Archive for dance teacher
January 23, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under dance, guest, TONY, dance technology, interactive, research, sarah lawrence college, students, education, dance teacher, performance, project, choreography, discipline, pedagogy, process, learning, intelligence, fun, dance criticism, dance lesson, social network, improvisation, Julie Cruse, VICKI, choreobot
For the last meeting of my class last semester, 12-21-07, I had Julie Cruse of Ohio State’s EMMA Lab as a guest to share her research in developing Chorebot VICKI. VICKI stands for Virtual Improvisational Choreographer / Kinetic Instructor. She a virtual automaton who guides a dancer through a structured improvisation using randomly generated verbal cues. Upon initializing VICKI she describes her purpose.
She says:
Choreobot is designed to challenge a dancer’s movement skills, and asks the dancer to draw upon advanced improvisational interpretation. I am programmed to make dances using theme and variation as prescribed by my creator. I use textbook dance methods, but - I am unpredictable. The dancer will demonstrate as I begin my next new dance.
Read more of Julie’s description of the technology HERE at the project website.
Before the lecture demonstration Julie and I had to rebuild modules of the assembly so that we could get VICKI to talk off Intel-based Macs. Retooling software under time constraints can be terribly stressful but I am glad to report we patched things up in time for the class. Julie’s lecture/demonstration was wonderful. She took some time to explain her impetus for building the machine and gave the students a tour of VICKI’s inner workings. Next Julie fired up the choreobot and demonstrated how she danced under VICKI’s instruction. Next she invited the students to try. Watching the student’s improvisation was exciting.
The system forces the dancer to think on their toes and make quick decisions. With time I could see a dancer becoming expert at navigating in this environment. Julie has clearly taken the time to do this. For her it was the first time she was able to observe other people dancing inside her system. By the end of the class everyone was incredibly energized and immersed in conversation regarding future research using choreobot VICKI. Julie has left us with a copy of VICKI and has encouraged us to continue experimenting with and mutating the system.
Matt Gough has taken a good deal of time developing an analysis of this work. In particular Matt takes issue with the description of the work as an “artificial intelligence” simply seeing it as an automated version of Cunningham’s method of chance procedures. Julie has documented the critical discourse HERE.
I met Julie inside Sector 9 of the blogosphere. There she has made bold gestures regarding dance-technology as a field. Like Matt Gough, she has voiced discontent over the current state of dance-tech.
She writes:
When I hear dance and tech, I think - it better not be ANOTHER interactive audio/video environment. It better not be ANOTHER…
…dance contextualized by projected videos
…dancer controlled by robotics or sensors improvisation in real time that composes the score
…motion capture in real time translated to animated projections
…wearable technologies that do something with sound or video
…animated avatars in second life real time “telematic” improvising
I find such pugilistic remarks invigorating and am excited to see what trouble Julie stirs up in the future.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
September 16, 2007 at 10:37 am · Filed under dance, friends, lifestyle, london, KATE, graham, contemporary, dance teacher, scottish ballet, dance studies, glasgow, the place, contemporary dance, martha graham dance company, summer intensive
I’m looking out of my window and trying to get some work done on a rainy Sunday morning. It’s really wet out there and the leaves on the trees across the street are starting to change colour and fall. This has been a rather sunless summer - not just here in Glasgow but my old friends in London have been complaining about it too. (We British DO talk about the weather, it’s not just a great big cliche…)
I find it very hard to believe we are nearing the end of September already. This has been the busiest summer of my life, and unfortunately it’s been almost all about work and not about dancing or anything else. However, it’s been good in the sense that I have learned a lot, especially since I have been working alone and for myself - both for my PhD and in doing some advertising consulting to pay the bills.
But it’s not all been about work and rain, oh no. At the beginning of August I went to London for a week, ostensibly to do some research but actually so I could hang around with some of my friends and do some of the summer intensive at the Place. The intensive was great. I did Graham Technique with Kim Jones from the Martha Graham Company - this was amazing. I was so happy to be doing the class again because it’s my favourite contemporary technique to do and yet it’s really hard to get a proper Graham class where I live. (Actually in London it wasn’t all that easy.) It made me sad that I wasn’t able to do more than just a week of class in the summer - because there’s no way I can ever be the dancer I want to be, because of money, time constraints, location, etc, etc. In Glasgow I can do a couple of good classes each week, and they are good, but they are not enough. But this is the way that people who love dance but aren’t full-time dancers live - we just have to make the most of what we’ve got. It’s hard to pop in and out of something like Graham, because during a week’s intensive it draws you in, like a life philosophy, and when it stops you feel bereft.
The other course I took was contact improvisation, which in the end I loved. I say ‘in the end’ because it was the first time I had ever done it, and to be honest for the first two or three days I felt completely lost and out of my depth. Not because it was technically difficult, because it’s not, but because it’s so much about trust and letting go. I had to let go of lots of preconceptions about things. For example, we were practicing lifts and I was scared that i would be too heavy, but our teacher said to remember that we are not as heavy as we think, and it’s much more about timing and trust. Having said that, I found it really hard to lift people who were shorter than me because the centre of their weight seemed to be so much lower down than mine. Over the course of the week I grew less scared about dancing with other people and by the end I was in love with it. I was also covered in bruises, because I did get dropped and fall down rather a lot. Unfortunately there’s nowhere I can do contact improvisation here, there used to be but it was discontinued because there weren’t enough people. Oh well.
The thing that I noticed when I was on the Intensive was how much better my alignment is and how much more movement I have in my back and my hips. This is because since May I have been taking weekly gyrotonics sessions with Penny Withers. Penny was trained at the Royal Ballet School and had a career with the Scottish Ballet, where she now runs the young associates training programme. Penny is a great teacher and I have learned so much from her.
Later on in August I went with some of my friends to a place in the woods which I love near Dumfries, in the south-west of Scotland. There we stayed in a reconstructed iron-age roundhouse, which had a thatched roof and a fire in the middle. There’s also an outdoor hot tub and sauna! The iron age people knew how to live. The fire was good because it rained all weekend and we were soaked, so at night we sat around the fire and dried off, drank rather a lot of wine and played games. It was really fun.
I’m now really excited because a) this week my favourite Glasgow contemporary class starts again (which is Graham/Cunningham style) and b) I am going to Greece for a week this coming Saturday.
Stand by for tales of sunshine and the seaside.
Recent Posts by kate bordwell
May 10, 2007 at 5:41 pm · Filed under schools, ANNE, ballet austin, dance teacher, dance photography, orlando canova
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| Posted by Anne Marie
When I was younger, we all wondered which of us would keep dancing. I had a very close group of friends when I was about 14, and out of the 6 of us I’m the only one who ended up dancing professionally. Who really knows why, that’s just the way the cards played out….
Periodically my husband and I talk about the friends we’ve danced with and wonder years down the road which ones will be Artistic Directors, Ballet Masters, and Choreographers … who are the future players? I think we’ve started to get our answers…
Coming up on a year ago our fellow Ballet Austin dancer, Orlando Julius Canova, became the Artistic Director of the Ballet Conservatory of South Texas, in San Antonio, Texas. Orlando all season has been driving down after his day at Ballet Austin, the hour plus drive at least 4-5 days a week to teach, coach and rehearse his dancers.
This past weekend we got to see them in action and seen the vast improvement of his dancers and overall production quality of BCSTX’s performance in “Turning Pointe”. I had seen them perform in November, only months after Orlando had been there, and let me tell you… this is a different group of dancers.
Here’s Orlando with BCSTX Board President and Vice-President, Susanne Cooper and Susan Arnim
Since now there’s an obvious relationship between Ballet Austin and the Ballet Conservatory, Orlando took it a step further and mixed his program with guest performances by Ballet Austin II directed by Michelle Martin. I’ll talk more about that aspect of the performance in another post…
Orlando has also integrated other BA dancers into the lineup: Ballet Mistress, Jaime Lynn Witts and Resident Choreographer, Reginald Harris. Ballet Austin Trainee, Donald Hicks, also choreographed a piece for the group integrating some of the BA’s male apprentices. This gave Orlando’s students a chance to work on their partnering skills, which some of you know at a small pre-professional school it’s a challenging task to get boys into the ballet studio.
Here’s a photo from Reginald Harris’ “Ella” featuring BCSTX dancer Beth Huddleston and guest artist, BA II dancer Chris Butler:
A photo of Orlando Julius Canova’s “Unstable Dependency” featuring BCSTX dancer Bryn Schiele and BA Trainee Donald Hicks:
One from Donald Hick’s “Adrenaline” featuring BCSTX dancer Analisa Rodriguez and guest artist, Ballet Austin dancer Matthew Cotter.
And here’s a couple from “Paquita” staged and rehearsed by Jaime Lynn Witts lovingly nicknamed by her Ballet Austin co-workers as “Rules and Structure”, which in my opinion makes her the perfect Ballet Mistress.
Erin Galvan in her variation:
Analisa Rodriguez in her variation:
And Elizabeth Arnim and Charlotte Cooper in Paquita:
Orlando, his students and all the parents and volunteers should be really proud of how far they’ve come in a year, and I’m really looking forward to watching them continue to grow.
Recent Posts by anne marie melendez
March 18, 2007 at 8:10 pm · Filed under dance, books, directors, teaching, TONY, theatre, class, Brazillian, students, education, politics, dance teacher, performance, breaking
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
Teaching is a kind of performance and through performance we do a bit of teaching. As performers, dancers should have an awareness of how their work functions; what kind of stories, or lessons, are they imparting to the audience and how are those narratives instrumental? Similarly, educators should have an awareness of the artistry in their teaching work.
Pedagogy is the science and art of teaching. As an educator, I think about how to present ideas in a way that is both meaningful and transformative. Brazilian born Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is famous for his contribution to educational theory through the development of “critical pedagogy.” For me and Freire, the goal of teaching should not be to reproduce a body of knowledge but rather to enable people to develop their own critical consciousness. Teachers should impart methods for asking questions rather than simply prescribing answers.
So what does this have to do with performance? Let’s turn to another radical Brazilian scholar and contemporary of Freire, Augusto Boal. This writer, director and cultural activist developed a political theatrical form called Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal used this theatric form for the purpose of radical political education and mobilization. Brazil’s military junta of the late 1960’s found this work so threatening that in 1971 Boal was arrested, tortured and exiled to neighboring Argentina where he published Theatre of the Oppressed.
Dancers should think critically about pedagogy as recipients of it, though their training, and providers of it, through their performance. The Winger is an amazing forum for opening up this conversation and engaging in transformative discourse with dancers, educators and spectators. Pedagogy and performance are intimately linked and as the video above demonstrates, dancing out ideas at the chalkboard has the capacity to create powerful movements.
Music: Ablution by Outside
This dance is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license.Enjoy.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
February 14, 2007 at 1:01 am · Filed under Uncategorized, SLOAN, video, savannah, welcome, VERONICA, dance teacher, choreographer, director, the STUDIO, juilliard
Perhaps some of you recognize this pretty face from some of the videos I did this summer when I was teaching in Savannah, Georgia.
I’d like to introduce Veronica Moretti Niebuhr… dance teacher, choreographer extraordinaire, and founder of the STUDIO dance school in Savannah, Georgia. Veronica spent a great deal of time dancing in both Rhode Island and New York City, as her impressive biography reveals, and now takes pleasure in raising her wonderful family (husband Mark, a very talented Juilliard-trained actor, and their two children Enzo and Sofia) and in training and inspiring her very talented students.
Veronica will be sharing with us her experiences as a dance educator, choreographer, and owner of her own dance studio.
If you’re interested, look back in the video archives and click on the iTunes button, or search for Savannah in the sidebar, for my previous footage from The STUDIO.
On another note…
I will be returning to Savannah this summer to teach again from August 1st through August 10th. If you are in the Savannah area, auditions are being held on March 3rd and March 24th at The Studio. Call for an appointment, and maybe I’ll see you in August!
Welcome Ms. V!
Recent Posts by kristin sloan
