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10 Questions With Alice Klock

April 28, 2018 by Rachel Hellwig

Alice Klock. Photo by Quinn Wharton.

1. How did you first become involved in dance?

I’ve been dancing as long as I can remember.

After having seen me improv my way through the living room for years, my mother asked if I’d like to try a ballet class. I was eleven and I’ve been at it ever since.

2. When/how did you realize you wanted to become a professional dancer?

I attended the San Francisco Ballet’s summer program at 13 and would watch the company work and rehearse whenever I could find a moment to sneak to their studio door. It was thrilling.

There was something so beautiful about the way the dancers interacted, the sense of company life, and I decided it was something I wanted to experience.

3. Was there ever a time when you thought of quitting dance or second-guessed your decision to pursue a professional career? If so, what helped you through that time?

Honestly, no. My commitment to this field has been pretty unwavering.

My path was tumultuous at times, but through set backs, injuries, and disappointments, I’ve never felt like quitting. I’ve felt the need to shift my environment, or my role within the profession, but that to me is an exciting evolution.

I would recommend to any struggling dancer who is wondering if they should quit to ask themselves if perhaps they are just in the wrong place, or if they are trying to be something they are not. The dance world is vast! There are more options than we sometimes suppose.

I am now at a point where I am transitioning out of dancing full-time so that I can choreograph more, but even that feels like an evolution rather than a departure.

https://vimeo.com/218059438

4. When/how did you realize you wanted to pursue choreography?

It is hard to say when/how, I’ve always loved choreographing!

I have been super lucky to have the support of my choreographic work that I have received at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and from my amazing boss Glenn Edgerton. I believe that Glenn has been instrumental in my journey to becoming a choreographer as he gave me the space, encouragement, and opportunities to truly nurture and find my voice. I’m incredibly grateful for that.

5. What inspires you as a choreographer?

Everything.

6. How would you describe your choreographic process?

My process is quite random, but always focuses on really using the dancers in the room.

I always strive to find the individualism in each artist, and unlock as much of their “personal genius” (something I believe each of us has) as I can. This means I seldom come in with too many preconceived notions about the piece I will make.

That being said, my movement is highly conceptual at its source, and is often directly derived from words or ideas. For example, I might ask a dancer “what is your favorite word?” or “what is the most amazing thing you have ever seen?” and then I shall construct a movement phrase out of their answer.

7. What’s the best advice you’ve received about choreography?

“Don’t hold anything back”

https://vimeo.com/218062887

8. What are some things you’d like to explore in your choreography career and dance career in the future?

I would like to work with a vast array of dancers, artists, and institutions. I love the unexpected and being put into contact with the unusual.

I would like to work with huge groups, with ballet dancers, with competition dancers, with non-dancers. I’d like to experiment with it all and to push the boundaries of what we think dance is.

I believe that as a creator it is paramount to create work that is inclusive and socially conscious and that breaks out of the often inappropriate antique norms that still exist in the art form.

As a dancer, I would like to continue to explore performing new and different work. Last year, Florian Lochner (a fellow Hubbard Street dancer and Choreographic Fellow) and I formed “Flock” which is a project in which we co-choreograph pieces that we then perform.

I am interested to grow this further and to see what that can open up for me as a performer. Dancing in our work is a particularly wild and satisfying experience and very different from the years I have spent in a rep company.

I also look forward to expanding “Flock” out further into the world and to see what that leads to.

9. You’re headed to Utah in May for SALT Contemporary Dance’s inaugural LINK dance festival. How did you first become connected with SALT?

SALT has been on my radar for some time as a place where I would love to create work. Their dancers are beautiful and varied and their mission is strong and inspiring. I was honored and excited to be asked to participate in their LINK festival.

10. What are you most looking forward about LINK?

The dancers! Like I said, I love being thrown into a studio with new dancers and this will be a particularly exciting process as our creation time is only a week! I am looking forward to see what we concoct!

https://vimeo.com/226251438


Disclosure: Rachel Hellwig serves as marketing director for SALT

Filed Under: 10 Questions With... Tagged With: 10 questions with, Alice Klock, career, chicago, choreographic process, choreography, contemporary dance, Contemporary Dance Choreography, hubbard street dance chicago, LINK Dance Festival, SALT Contemporary Dance, SALT Contemporary Dance LINK Dance Festival, Utah

10 Questions with Eldon Johnson

April 17, 2018 by Rachel Hellwig

Eldon Johnson. Photo by Christopher Peddecord.

1. How did you first become involved in dance?

I first became involved with dance through the Polynesian side of my family. My mother was a hula dancer, along with her brothers and sisters growing up, and as they all began to have kids, they started the next generation of performers.

It was also part of our culture to pass on these traditional dances to your family. I did not start my formal dance training until I was basically 17. Hip hop was originally what I intended to train in, but after taking jazz, tap, and ballet, per the requirements of the studio I trained at, I fell in love with more classical forms of dance.

2. When/how did you realize you wanted to become a professional dancer?

I knew I wanted to be a professional dancer after seeing a Janet Jackson music video. “If” and “Together Again” were the ones that really sparked my interest to start taking dance classes. My goal was to be a backup dancer for her.

3. Was there ever a time when you thought of quitting dance or second-guessed your decision to pursue a professional career? If so, what helped you through that time?

Through my 20 year career, there have been many times where I questioned whether dance was a sustainable way to make a living. I never questioned whether dance was right for me, but I often question whether I am good enough for dance.

Dance has always been a way for me to express myself, my passion for movement, and my desire to inspire emotion in those who may be watching me dance.

Many times, still to this day, however, I wonder if I am enough. I question if what I have to offer, as a dancer, artist, and performer, is good enough, meaningful enough, thoughtful enough, or will be enough to please an audience. It is the bane of being a dancer, or artist for that matter.

Making a living through dance, that is fulfilling, and not just repetitious, will always elicit those questions as well.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: 10 Questions With..., 4dancers Tagged With: 10 questions with, contemporary dance, Contemporary Dance Choreography, Dance in Salt Lake City, Dance in Utah, Eldon Johnson, SALT Contemporary Dance

The Amazing Adventures of Andrea Class: Reflections Of A New Teacher

September 20, 2015 by 4dancers

IMG_4953

by Andrea Thompson

For the past two summers, I have had the distinct pleasure and challenge of teaching in both Hubbard Street’s level III intensive and the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance’s summer program. This year I taught Hubbard Street 2 repertory in Chicago, aptly named “Andrea Class” in San Francisco, and ballet in both programs. Three summers ago, if anyone had asked me to teach I would have politely and very definitively declined. I didn’t feel ready. I didn’t feel that I was qualified to deliver information as if I were an expert when there was still so much for me to take in from my teachers and peers. After all, I felt, those who are designated as educators in this field should be both veterans of their subject matter and skilled orators, imparting tried-and-true wisdom to their earnest disciples. Though I had tried a lot of things, I hadn’t yet decided what my truths were. As it turns out, two years into my teaching journey I still haven’t, and every time I teach I seem to be amassing evidence that that’s not actually an essential element of it.

FullSizeRender

What is truth?

What I mean by “truth” is settling on a single approach based on years of building expertise in a particular movement vocabulary/philosophy. There’s certainly value in the long-term, deep study of one such language, just as there is value in having years of experience teaching. With experience come strategies for how to best communicate with and reach dancers of all age groups, skill levels, and dispositions. But in terms of class content and structure, I believe that there are infinite ways to go about challenging students to learn and grow and engage with dance. Personally, my relationship with it has been kept vibrant by the regular overhauling of the perspectives I’ve absorbed, since I have been lucky enough to come across new approaches to dance every few years of my career.

In the current climate of the contemporary genre it seems an urgent necessity to examine and utilize all the information I’ve engaged with, rather than decide that one system or movement language is more valid than another. It stands to reason that in order to stay relevant, delivering the multifarious ideas I like to employ requires a class structure that is fluid.

Reading the room


Needless to say this makes planning a little difficult. And as essential as planning is – more on that later – this summer I found that reading the room while teaching trumps nearly everything else in terms of importance. Depending on how the student-teacher interaction is going, handling the expectations of 30 trusting young dancers can feel like a huge responsibility – or a solo stand-up comedy show, a giant improv score, herding cats, accidentally going onstage naked, being lost in a foreign country, suddenly becoming an omnipotent wizard, a rock concert, or a psychological experiment in which the roles of subject and scientist are unclear.

It’s a constant conversation, and the same way that you would adjust your wording if you see you’re not getting your point across, or your listener is getting bored, you adjust your words or your physicality or your plan for the day in order to arrive at your point in class. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s this weird power of insistence that you have as a teacher that you might not use in polite conversation with a peer. I was surprised to find that sometimes, “try harder,” “stick with it,” and “just do it because I say so” were valid and effective demands that produced dramatic results. The beautiful simplicity of setting higher expectations in the room could be just as enabling of student improvement as wracking my brain for synonyms of the same idea and the resultant assumption that I, as a teacher, was failing to articulate what was needed.

But regardless of my ambitions for the environment I wanted to create and the growth I wanted to facilitate, this summer with Andrea Class I had to come up with the “what” of the class as well as the “how.” Most of my plans for Andrea Class began with an objective: a larger idea about dance or performance I wanted to explore, or a result I wanted to curate for the students, i.e. a feeling of freedom, the joy of digging into effort, or mastering some ubiquitous elements of floorwork. I compiled exercises that lent themselves to that end, mixing things I’d done before with new games and improv tasks. Next came playlist planning, since I have yet to find a streaming service whose musical tastes match my own. Occasionally I made a phrase to provide context for the research and highlight movement pathways I felt would be beneficial to work on.

IMG_4945

The “plan-n-scrap method”

After all that, most of my Andrea Classes played out thusly: armed with ideas and music, I would begin, and within a few minutes of moving around together surveying my surroundings, realize the majority of my planning was useless. I had picked the wrong theme of the day, or there was something else lacking in the atmosphere that needed to be addressed. I once played an improv game called “what the room needs,” and never has there been a better time to use it than while teaching, even if I’m the only one playing. After a handful of unsuccessful-feeling classes in which I stuck rigidly to my curriculum, I started applying that idea to my teaching and consequently scrapped most of my plans. I began to trust that my own experiences as a professional dancer (and not-too-distant student) would work together with my instincts and empathy to steer the spontaneous class structure. I tried to dance as much as possible in my classes so I could feel what I was asking of my students, and I found that my physical participation was often a better indicator of what needed to happen next than what I could divine from the front of the room. My dancing was also, I found out, much more effective than words in helping people figure out unfamiliar pathways in floorwork.

IMG_4946This plan-n-scrap method is evidenced in the hilarious log I kept of my Andrea Class teaching. In it I wrote my idea for each class followed by what actually happened when I got in there. I always started with a plan, and what I discerned was that my brain needed to go through the steps of making it in order to kickstart itself into curious-leader mode. Inevitably by the time class began my thoughts would be miles down the road from where they started, but my cranial engine did not rev up properly unless I truly applied myself to planning. My own class-taking within the Conservatory’s summer program also sparked ideas about what does and doesn’t work in dance education, and what my optimal role might be within the existing structure of it. Some of my reflections emerged days later while teaching, having stewed subconsciously until the right opportunity presented itself. Another advantage to all the planning was that I knew if I ever choked, I had not just a plan B written down, but C, D, E, and F to choose from.

At SFCD I had the luxury of working consistently with the same group of people over the course of four weeks. We got to know each other, trust each other, sweat together, grow together. I haven’t taught any “Andrea Classes” outside of that program, but I’m now very interested in continuing to explore my teaching voice as an ongoing aspect of my development within this field.

I almost wrote “find” my teaching voice, but I have a feeling that for as long as I continue to teach, I will never fully pin down my approach to dance or dance pedagogy as an absolute. It feels like the discoveries I made about myself as a teacher this summer have already begun to influence my own dancing, and have set the course for my approach to shift once again.

I once heard the brilliant ex-Forsythe dancer Christopher Roman confide to a teaching colleague, “I’m always changing my mind. I can’t do one thing today and expect it to still feel right tomorrow, but if it was right for that moment then it was the right thing.” So it went with my Andrea Classes this summer, and so it goes with my Andrea Teaching. Having moved past the fear of unpreparedness from three years ago, I’m now looking forward to charting the unknown seas ahead.


Andrea Thompson photo by Quinn WhartonContributor Andrea Thompson trained at the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, the Ailey School, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance. Those schools and programs with Springboard Danse Montréal, Nederlands Dans Theater and Batsheva Dance Company brought opportunities to perform works by William Forsythe, Ohad Naharin, Alex Ketley, Christian Burns, Marina Mascarell Martinez, Gregory Dolbashian, Idan Sharabi, Danielle Russo, and Robyn Mineko Williams.

Professionally, Andrea has danced with the Foundry, Zhukov Dance Theatre, and LoudHoundMovement. Most recently she danced with Hubbard Street 2, where she performed works by Loni Landon, Alex Soares, Alejandro Cerrudo, Ihsan Rustem, Bryan Arias, and Victor A. Ramirez. She joined Shen Wei Dance Arts this spring.

Filed Under: 4teachers Tagged With: Christopher Roman, contemporary dance, dance class, dance improvisation, Forsythe, hubbard street, new dance teacher, planning dance class, San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, sfcd, summer intensives, teaching dance

Dance Footwear: Sockage In The Sock Age

January 29, 2015 by 4dancers

Hubbard Street 2
Hubbard Street 2 Dancers Andrea Thompson and Jules Joseph in Long Story Short
by 2014 International Commissioning Project choreographer Ihsan Rustem. Photo by Todd Rosenberg.

As a dancer, I spend my entire day in socks. They are my preferred footwear — my dance shoes, my ballet slippers, my performance-wear, my fashion statement, my secret weapon. With only one exception (Alejandro Cerrudo’s Lickety-Split), all of the repertory I have performed onstage with Hubbard Street 2 has either been in calf-height socks that neatly match the rest of the costume, or ankle-height socks that match my skin tone. The latter look has been dubbed by some as “the Hubbard Street sock,” but it’s not just this company that performs in stocking feet. Most contemporary dance shows I’ve been to in the past six years have been performed either barefoot or in socks — a phenomenon I’ve come to understand and love, but which also elicits from the audience questions like, “Why are the dancers wearing socks? Are they in their pajamas? Where are their shoes?” Hopefully by sharing my passion for this form of footwear I can debunk and demystify the all-important Contemporary Dance Sock.

HS2 dancer
Hubbard Street 2 Dancer Andrea Thompson in socks at the Hubbard Street Dance Center. Photo courtesy of Andrea Thompson.

The first time I danced in socks was in 2009 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance. We were working with Alessio Silvestrin from The Forsythe Company, and without fail he wore socks over ballet shoes in every rehearsal. Coming from a ballet background, this was a new concept to me. I knew it was trendy to wear socks over ballet shoes in order to warm your feet faster for the first combinations at the barre, but I had no idea that in contemporary dance, people actually wore socks onstage in performance. Being the dutiful student I was, I tried to copy Alessio’s look, but I didn’t yet fully grasp the art of dancing in socks. I tried out all kinds in rehearsals: crew-cut athletic socks, calf-height socks of all synthetic blends, those plush fuzzy socks that are great in the wintertime, warm slipper-socks with rubber grips on the bottoms. When so many sock varieties failed to satisfy me I tried keeping my ballet shoes on and danced barefoot a few times, but soon realized that most contemporary choreography really works best in socks.

My friend Carson Stein (now a dancer with Liss Fain Dance and Sharp & Fine in San Francisco) tipped me off to the most important factor of sockage in dance: high cotton content. Synthetic blends had me slipping all over the place. Thick, fuzzy socks tended to stick more to the floor than to my feet, and my poor toes were swimming inside with all the extra room. Athletic socks worked alright, but I soon found that I was bothered by all the extra padding underneath certain parts of my feet and wanted to be able to feel my own skin nearly on the floor, but with a thin layer in between that hugged my foot and enabled me to slide around a bit. Enter the H&M sock: with 83% cotton content (higher in select styles!), it was a revelation. To this day it is the most affordable, most reliable sock I have found to dance in.

Hubbard Street 2 dancers footwear
Hubbard Street 2 Dancers in socks at the Hubbard Street Dance Center. Photo courtesy of Andrea Thompson.

Of course there are trends. American Apparel’s knee-high athletic socks were all the rage to dance in a few years ago, particularly the ones with stripes. I’ve found many a fun pair of patterned and unusually-colored socks in the men’s section of Uniqlo. They’re a little more slippery than my standard H&M sock, but depending on the floor they can also work. I usually go for a calf-height sock, but if they’re taller, like the men’s socks from Uniqlo, I’ll just fold them over. Hubbard Street is the only place where I’ve worn ankle-height socks, but when they’re dyed just right, they do a great job of continuing the line of the leg. One could argue that ballet shoes and bare feet do similar things for line, but wearing socks enables you to do all the sliding and swooshing around of contemporary choreography while keeping the skin of your feet in one piece.

For a while, even after I had gotten used to dancing in socks in rehearsals, I preferred to take ballet with ballet shoes on. Then I gradually started taking barre in socks and putting shoes on only for center. Then, sometimes, I would forget to change footwear during class. After I had an ankle surgery, I stayed in socks the whole time to make sure I could really feel the alignment of all the bones in my feet on the floor. I thought I would eventually put ballet shoes back on for at least part of class, but after trying a few times I realized I preferred to feel as much of my foot as close to the floor as possible. My feet feel more supple, dexterous and intelligent if they aren’t closed up in a shoe, dealing with leather pads under my toes and fabric bunching up inside.

Hubbard Street 2 dancer Andrea Thompson
Hubbard Street 2 Dancer Andrea Thompson in Long Story Short by 2014 International Commissioning Project choreographer Ihsan Rustem. Photo by Todd Rosenberg.

When my feet are free to play the floor in socks, I have a much better sense of where my weight is and I feel like I have access to 100% of my articulation, instead of feeling like I’m dancing in mittens or shoeboxes. And I think similar to the idea of those free-running shoe-gloves, you learn to deal with impact in a totally different way when you don’t have any padding underneath your joints. Jumping in socks was a little scary at first, without having the reassuring leather padding underneath the balls of my feet. But after some practice I found that in order to soften my landings while staying buoyant I was actually informing the entire rest of my body from the information I was getting from my feet. My plié had to adjust and become more sensitive, and my landings and takeoffs have, I believe, benefitted from the new knowledge.

From ballet to floorwork to sliding, slicing and swooshing, socks provide the perfect blend of friction, articulation, and maneuverability and so, no, we contemporary dancers have not forgotten to put on our shoes. We revel in our sockage.


Andrea Thompson and Hubbard Street 2 tour Europe with mixed repertory February 21–March 5, presented by Norddeutsche Konzertdirekton. Performances in Heerlen, the Netherlands; Treviso, Italy; and four cities in Germany will feature recent works by Bryan Arias, Ihsan Rustem, Loni Landon, HS2 Director Terence Marling and Hubbard Street Resident Choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo. For a complete HS2 touring schedule, artist profiles and more, visit hubbardstreetdance.com.


Andrea Thompson photo by Quinn Wharton
Hubbard Street 2’s Andrea Thompson

Contributor Andrea Thompson (Maplewood, NJ) trained at the New Jersey School of Ballet, American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School and the Ailey School in New York City. Thompson has also studied at the Juilliard School, Northwest Professional Dance Project, Springboard Danse Montréal, Nederlands Dans Theater and Batsheva Dance Company, which brought opportunities to perform choreography by Gregory Dolbashian, William Forsythe, Natalia Horecna, Jessica Lang, Marina Mascarell, Idan Sharabi, Robyn Mineko Williams, Paul Lightfoot and Sol León. At the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, under the direction of Summer Lee Rhatigan, she trained with and performed works by Christian Burns, Alex Ketley, Thomas McManus, Robert Moses, Ohad Naharin, Alessio Silvestrin and Bobbi Jene Smith. Thompson joined Hubbard Street 2 in August 2013, following work in San Francisco and New York with Zhukov Dance Theatre, Chang Yong Sung, LoudHoundMovement, Backwoods Dance Project and the Foundry.

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: alejandro cerrudo, alessio silvestrin, andrea thompson, Ballet, carson stein, contemporary dance, dance socks, h & m sock, hubbard street 2, liss fain dance, sharp & fine, the forsythe company

Student Spotlight: Charlotte Jeffery

September 26, 2012 by Ashley David

Next in our “Student Spotlight” series, meet Charlotte Jeffery…

Charlotte Jeffery

1. Can you tell readers how you became involved (and continued to be involved) with dance?

The start of my dance love affair began with ballet. Like hundreds of thousands of little girls across the world, when I was four, my Mum asked me if I wanted to do ballet, I said yes and it spiraled from there.

I began my ‘training’ (if we can call it that) in a drafty school hall with good toes, bad toes and winning little silver cups for my brilliant portrayal of a Siamese cat. I took all my ballet exams, and jumped around from syllabus to syllabus, I even spent one summer school at the Royal Ballet School, at White Lodge and was a Junior Associate of the Arts Educational School in Tring.

I was a ballet girl for a very long time (and still am in reality) but started contemporary when I was twelve or eleven – this incredibly cool teacher came to teach at our school (where we had dance as part of the curriculum) and introduced contemporary to all of us.

It was only natural therefore that when I continued dancing into GCSE and A level that I would take it higher into degree level. I have just graduated from Middlesex University with a 2:1 in Dance Studies.

While I was there I had the most incredible opportunity to study abroad. I traveled to the east cost of the USA, to Goucher College, in Baltimore where I stayed for four months and continued to train. I can honestly say now, that although it was one of the hardest four months of my life, emotionally and physically, it was also one of the best!!

Training in the states opened up yet more options for me and more choices for career paths. I trained in aerial dance (very scary but amazing) took contemporary, ballet, pointe work, a very intense choreography course and even got to work with some underprivileged children in the poorest area of Baltimore helping them to learn how to read and write by using movement as a tool for learning.

Now as a recent graduate I have decided to take the freelance route. I feel that there are far too many options for me, and I want to do so much, that I’m going to try and do it all; I call myself a freelance teacher, writer, community artist, dancer, arts administrator, choreographer… and the list is growing!

This has meant that even since I’ve graduated I’ve written reviews for up and coming companies, am currently in rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the Paralympics (29th August 2012), I have taught workshops at primary schools, and as of this week (until about Christmas time) I am working at the Royal Ballet School as an Interim Development and Publicity Coordinator. (See I told you I was a real ballet bod at heart!)  As of September I will add a new title to my belt, Artist in Residence, at a school in Buckinghamshire teaching lots of the extra curricular dance and some admin there too.

2. What do you find you like best about dance class? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Student Spotlight Tagged With: Ballet, Charlotte Jeffery, contemporary dance, dancer, freelance dancer, Goucher College, pointe work, the royal ballet school

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