teaching dance

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

March 10, 2014 by 4dancers

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

______________________________________

by 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…]

DVD Review: The Magic of the Mat: Teaching Little Ballerinas on the Alphamat Volume 1

March 3, 2014 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

This hour-long instructional DVD is a teaching tool from Magical Kingdom of Dance for use in preschool and pre-ballet classes. Developed by Mary Alpha Johnson over the course of 67 years of teaching, and continued by her daughter Tonie Johnson Bense, the curriculum in this DVD is designed to inspire young dancers with the use of characters, poems, and songs. There are games for learning right from left, using directions in personal and general space, and for basic ballet and locomotor steps. All the French ballet terms used are paired with a character to make memorization fun and meaningful: Saute the Bunny, Port de Bras the Octopus, and Bouree the Bumblebee are just a few friends featured on the DVD.

In The Magic of the Mat, Johnson Bense leads a group of sweet three- to six-year-olds through their paces on an illustrated 52” square mat. While the DVD and mat are designed to be used together, the exercises Bense teaches her young dancers could be easily adapted to any pre-ballet class setting. They would make an especially good starting point for someone new to teaching little ones. From putting on diamonds out of a jewelry box to buzzing around an imaginary front yard with bourees, The Magic of the Mat contains great strategies for a fun, imaginative, disciplined, and joyful pre-ballet classroom. The DVD and many other teaching tools, along with more information about the curriculum, can be found online at MagicalKingdomOfDance.com

The Arts – A Positive Effect On Bullying- Part 2

January 10, 2014 by 4dancers

by Janet Neidhardt

In March, 2013 I wrote a blog about working on a piece with my high school dance students based on bullying. We titled the piece: “I’m Taking It Seriously”. I wanted to give an update and provide a video that we created about the making of the dance as well as the finished product.

Since the performance of “I’m Taking It Seriously”, students who saw the dance still talk about it. When we discuss making a dance about something with social relevance it’s usually the first example they come up with now. I also have students who want to continue to make dances about bullying. They have started to look at it from a deeper perspective like expressing the inner emotions someone has when they get bullied.

As a dance educator I feel a responsibility to my students and community to serve them through dance and show that dance can be so much more than beautiful technique, it can communicate ideas and messages that might shift how we treat one another. It’s clear that the conversation about bullying is an ongoing one and that dance, being an art form in which we can express ourselves, is a wonderful means to spur conversation–and possibly make changes.

Loyola Academy Intermediate Dance Class from Loyola Academy on Vimeo.

dancer posing upside down — Janet Neidhardt

Contributor Janet Neidhardt has been a dance educator for 10 years. She has taught modern, ballet, and jazz at various studios and schools on Chicago’s North Shore. She received her MA in Dance with an emphasis in Choreography from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and her BA in Communications with a Dance Minor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout her time in graduate school, Janet performed with Sidelong Dance Company based in Winston-Salem, NC.

Currently, Janet teaches dance at Loyola Academy High School in Wilmette, IL. She is the Director of Loyola Academy Dance Company B and the Brother Small Arts Guild, and choreographs for the Spring Dance Concert and school musical each year. Janet is very active within the Loyola Academy community leading student retreats and summer service trips. She regularly seeks out professional development opportunities to continue her own artistic growth. Recently, Janet performed with Keigwin and Company in the Chicago Dancing Festival 2012 and attended the Bates Dance Festival.

When she isn’t dancing, Janet enjoys teaching Pilates, practicing yoga, and running races around the city of Chicago.

“Studio Thinking” In Dance

December 6, 2013 by 4dancers

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…]

Dancing to Feed the Body…Not Starve It

November 12, 2013 by 4dancers

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…]

Disclosure – Affiliate & Ad Info

Copyright Notice