In 2011, when I entered the work force as a dance educator for the first time, I was devastated. At 24 years old, I believed that teaching was where a dancer’s career went to die. During my years of training, the only aspiration I ever had was to be a performer. That was all I had ever been prepared for. I believed that as a teacher, my sole focus would forever more be on training proficient technicians for their own moments in the sun. For years, that was my focus; teaching kids the skills they would need to advance and perform at the high levels to which they aspired. It was not until I was forced to question my own values that I began to develop an educational philosophy that would challenge and revise my practices, which had a direct impact on what success meant for the students in my classes.
I built my teaching practice at a Black owned private dance studio in metro-Detroit, where the dancers had passion and potential, but lacked the lines and refinement that would allow them access to perform at higher levels. Having just earned a degree from a university that specialized only in Eurocentric techniques and practices, I proposed a redirection of the program, prioritizing the drastic increase in ballet training that I felt was necessary to validate their movement expression. While this shift toward an intentional daily practice did refine their movement, it was not the ballet training alone that was most valuable to their artistic experience. At this point in my career, my curriculum was centered on “teaching to the test.” The field, the media, and our society had communicated, not only to me but also to the learners under my care, that the only way to gain validation and success as a dancer was to rise to the standard of ballet.
By 2018, I had developed a professional identity and had pieced together an artist’s life, teaching, taking class, picking up freelance gigs, and dancing for a fledgling ballet company. I was succeeding based on an ideology grounded in patriarchy and white supremacy, and as an educator I was now passing this same ideology on to my students. In the next year, I would leave the ballet company, feeling tokenized and disconnected; feeling like my body, my technique, and my artistry would never quite be enough for the valued aesthetic. I left abruptly, citing all the ways in which the specific company made me feel like I did not belong, but what I would eventually realize was that this was the work of a system, not necessarily that of an individual group. Simultaneously, I reached similar realizations in my personal life that opened my eyes to the abuses of power that had become so clear that I began to problematize my own life practices to better understand the values that underscored my validity.
When I left the company, I began a rigorous search for what was missing in that experience. I had fortunately found an immediate home in a contemporary collective of Black and Brown dancers that mirrored my identities, valued my lived experience, and allowed me to offer my whole self to the artistic process. Reprioritizing my practice away from a rigorous ballet ritual allowed me to examine the function of the form and how it impacted my understanding of self. Apart from a ballet development class that I taught weekly to a group of 9–11-year-olds at the studio, I had completely irradicated ballet from my artistic practice. I was hoping to find my voice independent of the external standards that had equated success and value thus far. Dancing for the collective reminded me of coming back home. It reminded me of all the benefits of centering my experience in my learning, training, and art making. What had made my first students so successful was not particularly their ability to master the ballet tradition. They were (and continue to be) successful because they prioritized a daily practice of body organization while continuing to center their own identities. They danced to music from their own culture, danced stories familiar to them, performed for audiences that could understand their perspectives. They saw themselves in the lessons each day and were able to connect personally with their practice. They never had to put pieces of themselves aside to reach a goal that was outside of themselves.
Upon taking a position in a new educational institution, I was contracted to teach an Honors Ballet Technique and Theory class. In the transition between dance teacher/performer and dance educator/scholar, I began to craft a curriculum that would equip learners with the tools necessary to make up their own minds about the form modeled after my own curiosities and explorations of myself inside of the practice. Moving out of a Black community into an affluent, white, progressive one also magnified my awareness of power and privilege and where oppressive practices were glaringly present in my life. Without the constant emphasis on production, this charge opened an opportunity for me to think critically about ballet (and jazz dance) and deeply research the history and systems that had so heavily influenced my experience thus far. Having not only lived the experience of traditional ballet training (especially as Black dancer), but also seeking the truth in the history and hidden curriculum of the form, allowed the space for me to locate myself within the systems and reimagine what my practice might look like through the lens of this new awareness. Grounding myself in these values and philosophies has helped me in problematizing my jazz dance practice and my choreographic praxis as well. This is the type of learning that will benefit learners most in this time. As we continue to navigate the 21st century, it is vital that we equip learners with the tools necessary for critical thinking, creative reimagining, empathy, and self-awareness.
By developing this curriculum, I am seeking to understand why we continue to choose ballet to train our bodies and tell our stories given the truths we uncover about its systems. Might we be able to practice this traditional artform in a new way that disempowers the hierarchy and oppression that have sustained it for so long? What is ballet's role in my artistic and teaching practice and how do I guide others to their own revelations without feeding them my biased opinions? Lastly, must we sacrifice training for education; or might we be able to have it all? While these questions and considerations are specific to ballet, I advocate for the use of these same curriculum values in any educational experience. Equipping learners with the tools for critical discovery necessitates interdisciplinary exploration that stretches the limits of most traditional classroom or studio teaching.
These personal experiences have led me to the development of an educational philosophy that rests on four key pillars: truth seeking, self-discovery and reflection, reimagination, and articulation. For, if we do not seek the truth (the whole truth) we will forever be trapped within systems that do harm. Instead, we learn to use the truth to measure our experiences which inform the views we hold of ourselves and the values that guide our practices. When we locate ourselves within these systems, we can dismantle them by reimagining what might be possible and breaking down the boundaries that tie us to unsustainable traditions. And finally, we learn to communicate our findings with others so that they might be witnessed, talked about, fought over, and thought through.
In the development of these values and philosophies, I recognize the need for flexibility and freedom in my teaching spaces. I have been fortunate to have crafted my career thus far within the bounds of the private sector. This has allowed me to experiment and explore, making changes and redirecting as I discover more about myself within the curriculum. This can be more difficult inside of a public-school setting that requires specific goals and benchmarks in class planning. Although the state standards for dance are much more critical than many of those set in private sector commercial studios, there is immense value in being able to navigate these explorations personally, allowing the results of the explorations to drive the creation of a critical curriculum. Along with the four pillars of my teaching philosophy, a foundational value that I hold for my practice is working in partnership with organizations whose mission and values are aligned with my own, allowing me to continue this work.
Yorumlar