After more than 30 years working as a dance artist, filmmaker, and educator, my fascination with dance as a medium of creative expression and a means to study the human condition continues to fuel my teaching, research, and creative work. In all these endeavors, I am motivated by an insatiable curiosity for the myriad ways in which people constitute meaningful lives. For me, in part, this is made manifest through the intense study of embodied practices and the collaborative creation of dance works for live performance and/or screen(s). We all have bodies, and, how we experience and perceive movement impacts how we relate to, communicate with, and make sense of ourselves, one another, and the world we move through. In my teaching and creative work, I prioritize embodied learning and artistic collaboration to facilitate critical inquiry, knowledge production, and enhance creativity.
My teaching practice is grounded in three core interests: to heighten somatic and relational awareness, to identify and understand patterns of perception and embodiment, and to encourage curiosity and experimentation through collaborative creative processes. In order to achieve the above, whether in studio classes, seminars, or rehearsals, I work diligently to create inclusive, collaborative learning environments that support critical inquiry, dialogue, and creativity.
In my studio-based classes I strive to be adaptive and responsive to students. In Modern/Contemporary I/II/III, I offer combinations of set movement sequences and relational improvisation practices to increase embodied awareness and creativity. I enhance embodied learning by using anatomy apps and physical models to provide visual aids that clarify musculo-skeletal connections within human bodies. This helps students visualize internal connections, while increasing somatic awareness and a more dynamic understanding of body alignment and muscular coordination.
In Dance Improvisation, I encourage full commitment to our shared exploration of new persons, movements, and ideas through partnering and group exercises. I regularly employ improvisational prompts and mini studies to investigate the dynamics of changing relationships between dancers, sound, objects, and spaces. We also work to recognize movement patterns, uncover habits, and take risks to expand upon existing knowledge. When we shift from individual improvisational explorations to partnering work, students are asked to accommodate the movement impulses of other dancers, while not losing sight of their own. Through collaborative, co-creative exercises that encourage both self-reflection and accommodation of this kind, students learn to deftly fluctuate their attention between internal and external impulses as they move through embodied states of relational awareness–to their own bodies, those of their collaborator(s), and the spaces and places they move in and through.
In Composition, we continue to work on acknowledging existing lenses of observation and perception that shape our choices as dance makers. Assignments are structured to expand upon student’s compositional tendencies by challenging comfort zones through experimentation. By providing multiple studies that urge students to take risks with movement material, music and sound, spatial relationships, etc., students develop new insights into their own creative process. This also involves critical analysis of choreographic choices through the practice of observation and giving and receiving feedback.
In my Screendance class, I take an expansive approach to what constitutes dance. Students’ screendance subjects can range between moving human bodies, moving animals, movement in the natural world (e.g. water flowing over rocks in a stream, leaves blowing in the wind), or even inanimate objects in motion (e.g. a ball rolling, a kite flying). In this class, we center movement–the choreography of moving bodies, the choreography of moving cameras, and the choreography of the edit. I also consistently strive to expand the breadth of work I share with students. I provide readings and screenings of work from artists and scholars representing a multiplicity of backgrounds, dance forms, ways of making, geographic location, and identity signifiers. I introduce students to work that includes performers of varied body type, ability, gender, age, and race, as well as digital and non-human performance. My goal is to emphasize the possibilities of screendance as a hybrid form of artistic expression.
Ultimately, through the practical and intellectual investigation of dance as an interdisciplinary medium of study, I am committed to providing students with a solid foundation for critical inquiry by encouraging embodied awareness, curiosity, experimentation, and collaborative making. By engaging habits of movement and perception in relation to themselves, one another, and environment(s), students will be better equipped to understand and communicate both their individuality and shared humanity as artists and engaged citizens.
Courses taught: Modern/Contemporary (all levels), Dance Improvisation, Composition, Screendance, Somatic Practices & Research, Production Lab: Dance, Independent Study: Dance, How Dance Matters, Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, The Art of Dance, Dance History, Dance Repertory, Special Topics in Dance, Electronic Identity and Embodied Technology Atelier
image: Martin Springborg