by 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…]