Teaching Dance

Creative Process speech given at the President's Faculty Dinner and Lecture for Webster University at Bissinger's Historic Chocolate Factory in St. Louis on August 20, 2015.

In Making Your Life as an Artist , Andrew Simonet writes, “The scientific method and the artistic process are the two most robust problem-solving methodologies ever developed. Take either one away, and our world would be unrecognizable.” As an artist and educator, my life is built around the practice, study, and teaching of the artistic or creative process. I am passionate about it. It is what excites and energizes me to get up each day and walk into the classroom or studio. However, incoming freshman dance majors, students choosing to pursue fine arts degrees, often are more able to recite the scientific method, or even elements of critical thinking, than they are stages of the creative process. I imagine that this is partly because we do not give creative process much weight in our education systems and partly because these students often believe in the myth that creativity is something that starry-eyed, eccentrics are gifted with and the rest of us, the level-headed

With the news of the passing of jazz dance legend Luigi , I dug up this online article I wrote 15 years ago about him. With a deep bow of reverence to the man and his contribution... Class with Luigi On the back cover of Luigi's Jazz Warm Up, movie star John Travolta says, "Luigi always defined Jazz dancing for me in the same unique form that Jack Cole did."  As I cut through Manhattan's Central Park on my way to Studio Maestro, where 75 year old jazz dance legend Luigi currently teaches, I am reminded of the movie Staying Alive - the sequel to Saturday Night Fever. In Staying Alive, John Travolta plays an ex-disco dancer who turns professional Broadway dancer. While the script and the acting of Staying Alive were poor (a tradition that has been carried on by other dance movies such as Showgirls and more recently, Center Stage), John Travolta, restrained to only a few small dance combinations and a loin cloth, looked surprisingly professional. As legend has it

One day I walked into my office, overwhelmed with what lie ahead. Treading water inside my head, making a to-do list was a release valve that took away some of the pressure. As I finished, I looked at the list, paralyzed where to begin, what to do first. I plugged away for hours and hours until the end of the day I realized, I had gotten little of importance accomplished. 4 Es from James Robey I reflected back on my choices of what to work on from my list and it seemed that all the small inconsequential busy work sucked my time and energy. My mind tricked me by procrastinating through meaningless tasks. My subconscious dictated that I could not give my full energy and focus to the meaningful things until I had cleared away, cleaned up, and taken care of all the loose ends. The result: I never touched the meaningful things. What’s worse, I realized how many tasks on my list did not need to be there in the first place. So, I devised a system to simplify my list by dec