Archive for pedagogy
March 29, 2008 at 4:20 am · Filed under studio, media, video, teaching, TONY, dance and technology, science, space, physics, apples, computer graphics, opengl, education, performance, school, pedagogy, astronomy, learning, hermes, arts, double feature, animation
Last month I wrote a guest post on Matt Gough’s blog quodlibet titled math skills. It addressed the question of what fundamentals of physics and mathematics should be included in the dance technology curriculum.
Since dance-tech is in its infancy and still forming as a field this is an open question. This issue is not simply about inserting math and science into an arts curriculum but more so about how these two worlds partner. The action is reciprocal, math and science inform the dance and dance-tech provides new ways of knowing math and physics.
Force is one of the central landmarks of physics pedagogy. Gravity is Newton’s force.
And to use the force you must learn the force.
Simulation is a great way to learn about forces.
So is dancing.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
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
October 8, 2007 at 1:05 pm · Filed under dance, artists, books, training, teaching, TONY, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, blog, education, michel foucault, discipline, pedagogy, thoinot arbeau, orchesographie
This fall I am back at Sarah Lawrence College teaching Dance and Technology. All of my students are smart, engaged and still unsure whether I am really crazy, or just pretending. We have set-up our own class blog where we discuss readings and communicate about building dance machines. The blog is appropriately located at http://dancemachines.blogspot.com. Come over for a visit. Other folks seem to be taking interest. Matt Gough wrote an incredibly encouraging post you can see here.
For readings we have started out with sections from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Here is a part of that conversation.
Locating dance within Foucault’s framework of docility is both difficult and provocative. In attempting to pin dance to this trellis it becomes apparent that dance is slippery and cannot be easily categorized. It is clear however that discipline and dance are deeply entangled. Natasha spots this in the body of the soldier.
These men of the 17th-late 18th centuries were molded into figures with upright postures, programmed steps and structured attitudes; compare to ballet, especially, where all of these are instructed from an early age. Even the goals are similar - achieving honour and respect (of movement), grace, alertness, agility and strength. The quote on pg. 136: “A body that is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved”, is applicable to any dance class or performance, even improvisational. We are constantly subjecting our bodies to our aspirations and limitations, using the body and our knowledge to further its abilities for the task at hand, transforming it (whether in attitude or structure) to execute movements and improving it for the short-term goals and the long-term benefits.
Foucault opens his section on docile bodies with a reading of Montgommery’s 1636 military manual La Milice francaise. It’s description of the dancerly pikeman, who ‘will have have to march in step in order to have as much grace and gravity as possible’ resonates with Thoinot Arbeau’s dance manual Orchesographie. Written less than 50 years earlier, it had illustrated the strong linkages between choreography in the court and on the battlefield.
Thinking that making a dancer is just another instance of creating a docile subject (be it a soldier, factory worker, school child, or mental patient) can be uncomfortable to say the least. Janet points out how subtle power mechanisms can operate to form the subject.
For example the idea of coercion - that the power structure is being so fully and well imposed because of the fact that it’s being slipped in the back door, so to speak. “Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious,” (p. 139). It’s not being beaten into people, it’s “proper” execution is being rewarded. It is being made convenient. I think that these ideas have a very great relationship to the more “open” versions of modern and contemporary dance technique. Even when we are not working from highly stylized and codified techniques, we are still being instructed by a teacher, being ordered into levels, being auditioned for placement and so on. Therefore if we are properly disciplined in WHATEVER is the “proper” kind of “technique” (even if that is merely a general body awareness?), we are being subject to a certain power structure based on WHO decided what is “proper”.
We are inside a discipline machine with all of the spatial and temporal markers Foucault describes. This class demonstrates that. A component of the dance {1,2}/3 or graduate study in the department of dance at Sarah Lawrence College. The class is physically located in a distinct place within a time table. The time and space within the class is also divided and in doing so controls the physical activities of the participant bodies. Some stand, some sit, some on the floor, some on chairs, some speak, some erase, some write and some read. We move inside the computer for a spell. Then there is time and space designated for dancing. Our bodies and activities are seem well placed within space, time and the structure of the academy.
But, Sarah Rosner pushes back with a contrarian maneuver.
I think the thing that hit me most about the idea of discipline via the control of movements is how much i DIDN’T feel like it applied to my experience of dance.
And Sarah Richison voices related discontent, but finds in it a contradiction.
say you revolt. are no longer docile. escape from prison. you find some way to do some other dance. so you move off and do your own thing and someone follows you. someone wants to do your dance. are you then the new discipline? yes. you have manipulated their body, right.
For those of you who were looking for straight answers I fear that we have none. Instead we are left with a set of contradictions and a general understanding that dance is slippery, at times obedient and located, at other times disobedient and dislocated. Here are one, two, three, four dances, two made inside the institution and two made outside. Dissect them with regards to this contradiction between dance’s discipline and disruption.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
May 4, 2007 at 2:19 pm · Filed under books, TONY, education, performance, community, reading group, andre lepecki, dance studies, pedagogy
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| Posted by Tony Schultz
This week Maia Jordaan, a choreographer and graduate student from South Africa, found our reading group and injected a healthy dose of enthusiasm, intellect, and curiosity into the conversation. Yet another amazing person I have met through the internet. She seemed to have found us through Swan Lake Samba Girl.
Thanks Tonya and greetings Maia!
Maia is studying in the department of Contemporary Performance at Rhodes University. Her master’s thesis uses elements of Lepecki’s theoretical framework to analyze contemporary South African dance. Read what she has to say. Her comment on the original reading group post is provides great ideas and resources. The SARMA database is a great online resource for dance studies and criticism. Since Exhausting Dance deals with so many ideas Lepecki has developed in other writings it can be helpful to read some of his related work on the SARMA database. Maia points us toward http://www.sarma.be/text.asp?id=869 called: “Undoing the fantasy of the (dancing) subject: ‘Still acts’ in Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance” and encourages us to follow the links.
The difficulty, or best part (depending on how you look at it), is that grappling with this scholarship forces you to do research in all the related scholarship. So as we might get lost in following the links of a web page we can also get lost in Lepecki’s references and footnotes.
Luckily we have a smart team and collectively have the intellectual resources to tackle this project. I found another rabbit hole that some might find helpful. The reading list for Lepecki’s course on Movement Theory can be downloaded here. You many of these texts referenced throughout Exhausting Dance. I read Randy Martin’s Critical Moves and Mark Franko’s The Work of Dance in order to get a better handle on what Lepecki is communicating.
It will be exciting to carve out this conversation and we should feel lucky to have found our friend Maia. I would love if Maia could join The Winger and we could collaborate in framing this discourse.
So please Kristin, pretty please, can we keep her? 
Maia suggested collecting online video links to works by the artists discussed in Exhausting Dance. This is a great idea and am looking forward to see what folks dig up.
Maia has also added a number of comments that relate to identifying some important questions and ideas. Lets add them to our laundry list of useful ideas.
1. dance=movement (John Martin)
2. modernity=movement (Sloterdijk)
kinetic excess of modern industrial capitalism
kinetic excess of modern political mobilization
3. dance=politics (Randy Martin)
dance is inherently political in its mobilization of bodies
4. the book title
what is ‘performance’?
what is ‘dance’?
how does the term ‘exhaustion’ play?
what is ‘the politics of movement’
how do all of these link?
Recent Posts by tony schultz
April 14, 2007 at 2:24 am · Filed under teaching, SUSAN, education, new york city, abt, university, pedagogy
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NEW MASTERS PROGRAM |
Yesterday, I received an email from New York University announcing a very exciting new postgraduate study opportunity. The State of New York very recently approved a new curriculum in dance education, allowing NYU and ABT this new opportunity for partnership and collaboration:
Together, the two organizations are offering the first ever graduate program in Dance Education with a concentration in Ballet Pedagogy. Students taking part in this programme will have the opportunity to take courses on teaching methods and dance composition from NYU and ABT’s esteemed faculty, including:
What an awesome opportunity to learn from some of the industry’s finest!
Recent Posts by susan kim
March 26, 2007 at 1:10 am · Filed under books, invite, TONY, dancing, education, politics, performance, community, project, reading group, andre lepecki, pedagogy
The full collection of posts for this reading group can be found at the link here.
Last week I wrote (and danced in) a post entitled Performance and Pedagogy, presenting the work of two radical scholars, Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. In it I discussed the relationship between performance and education and how each could raise critical consciousness by promoting active dialogue. The Winger (and this whole corner of the blogosphere for that matter) is an ideal space for performing this type of dialogical dance. In a recent conversation with Tonya Plank regarding dance and politics, we had the idea of forming a reading group to add more depth to our discourse.
I would like to officially invite all of you to participate in an experiment, the formation of an online reading group relating to dance and dance studies.
Tonya and I thought of starting with Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement by Andre Lepecki. Like Freire and Boal, Lepecki is another radical scholar whose ideas have fundamentally transformed the way I think about dance and education. (He is also coincidentally Brazilian-born.) Lepecki currently teaches dance studies, performance studies, critical theory and philosophy at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Exhausting Dance is a wonderful book as it is both difficult and stimulating. Since it is such a short but challenging book it is ideal as the first text in this reading group. You can order the soft cover version of Exhausting Dance from Amazon right here. It is well worth the purchase. Perhaps we could have our first group analysis in a couple of weeks where we could pick apart the first chapter.
Write a comment if you would like to participate. This feels like the start of something big!
Recent Posts by tony schultz
