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...

This Thursday and Friday (Mar 14 & 15, 2014) I will speak at the research symposium Transmodernism: Integrating the Art and Science of Movement at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I feel excited and privileged to be part of this community of movement artists and specialists that I deeply respect, exploring the potential of movement in the 21st century. When most people think of dancers, they envision fit, active, lithe creatures. They don't often think of dancers as nerds. But, if you define nerds as people inordinately passionate and mentally fixated on their particular interests, then dancers can be just as nerdy as anyone. And, I say this lovingly, this symposium promises to prove it. My presentation, Transmodernism in Dance , will explore my research of Dance Paradigms using the Gravesian Framework which I have outlined in this blog. I continue to find new depths and wrinkles in this area of research. Currently, I have been exploring its application in a variety...

Artist Molly Brennan installing sculpture At a faculty event recently one of my senior colleagues shared that she just doesn’t get art, or dance. While that disappoints me in some ways, I found her honesty refreshing. The natural urge to search for meaningful patterns in life, leads many, when looking at art, or dance, to the same exasperated revelation: “I don’t get it.” The truth is, more often than not, there is nothing specific to get. Art can be, but is not often, about communicating a clear, specific message. From my perspective, it is most often about the experience, the spark of connection, between the artwork, the viewer, and the artist—not the message. For example, a series of singular events, makes no attempt to convey a message. Rather, the work developed out of an exploration of three continuums: the micro to the macro, the biological to the technological, and the fragmented (singular) to the connected (series). If I arrived at any final me...

Be warned, these are clips from a studio rehearsal with unfinished costumes...just a peek (quite literally) into what is coming up this weekend!

In a week I will premiere my first work for the Webster University Dance Ensemble. The piece, a series of singular events , began as the Singularity Project and I have shared elements of the creative process that went into its creation here on this blog. While movement phrases--and their development--have been posted here, I have not talked much about the technological aspects of the work. First, I created a soundscape by editing and mixing recordings of Tibetan singing bowls, electronic chamber music, and good old analog television static. Does digital cable television have static? I wonder if there soon will be a day where, when I use the word static, young kids will look at me as if I am speaking a foreign language—much like they do now when I mention a typewriter. Anyway, I used Logic Express software on a MacBook Pro to create the soundscape. In addition to the soundscape, I created a video collage from public domain footage I gathered from creativecommons.com. I edited th...

This is the piece just before we entered Spring Break. When the dancers return to rehearsal we will have less than four weeks to complete it and get it performance ready.

We are in the fourth week of rehearsals for the Singularity Project now and we have begun forming phrases from the vocabulary of movement the dancers discovered. In the first week and a half, I gave the dancers group, solo, and duet improvisational tasks. I recorded the improvisational studies and plucked from them the movement ideas that piqued my curiosity. Using the movement ideas, I again asked the dancers to improvise with a partner through the third week of rehearsals. From the recordings of these explorations, I chose to arrange certain phrases into sequences with small transitions to connect them. The five phrases on the video are still rough, but they developed directly from the dancers explorations. Had these explorations occurred with a different set of dancers, in a different time, or with different cues, the phrases would be entirely unique. I am particularly interested in the singularity of these phrases...that they are unique to this group - at this time - and no...

Fun with Partner Yoga?! In this rehearsal, we played with poses from Melissa's (my better half) book on partner yoga. It turned out to be a fun, somewhat silly rehearsal.

Here is another round of movement culled from our original explorations. This batch of movement includes more silly and idiosyncratic bits as well as some athletic partner work.

We are two weeks into rehearsals now and some intriguing movement vocabulary is developing. I had reviewed the videos from prior rehearsals and chose the movements, concepts, and moments that peaked my curiosity. I presented those concepts to the dancers for another round of movement explorations, asking them to focus on these scraps and bits of movement to see where it would lead them. Each of the experiments for this last rehearsal derived from the results of the prior rehearsals. Currently, the dancers and I seem interested in the vocabulary developing that  comes from interdependent, organic momentum where the dancers move into and through the floor in fluid movement patterns that could only be found in the space of ability between two or more dancers. The video captures some of these raw moments.  Please, if you feel so inclined, take a moment and share your thoughts. And, Kam - since your comments indicated you liked Kat's foot dance - the opening and closing are fro...

For our first rehearsal on this new project—Singularity—I started off by sitting down with a group of dancers from Webster University to discuss the concepts for the piece and the processes I intend to use for this exploration. Singularity—as I am using it—has two meanings. Principles/Hypothesis/Intention First, singularity is used to mean an once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. In this sense, it is the idea of any performance being unique and unrepeatable. Drawing from theories of relativity, I want to explore this concept where the audience members actually impact the unfolding of the dance—like Schrodinger’s Cat . My intention is to explore, through the use of interactive digital media, the audience’s participation and impact upon a live performance. The second use of singularity is the idea from Ray Kurzweil that biology and technology will merge at a point in the near future. Now, I am not as much as a futurist as he, but this does lead me to think abou...