Teaching Dance Studies

Judith Chazin-Bennahum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134947614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Teaching Dance Studies is a practical guide, written by college professors and dancers/choreographers active in the field, introducing key issues in dance pedagogy. Many young people graduating from universities with degrees – either PhDs or MFAs – desire to teach dance, either in college settings or at local dance schools.

This collection covers all areas of dance education, including improvisation/choreography; movement analysis; anthropology; theory; music for dance; dance on film; kinesiology/injury prevention; notation; history; archiving; and criticism.

Among the contributors included in the volume are: Bill Evans, writing on movement analysis; Susan Foster on dance theory; Ilene Fox on notation; Linda Tomko addresses new approaches to teaching the history of all types of dance; and Elizabeth Aldrich writing on archiving.

Chapter 1
Teaching Movement Analysis

BILL EVANS

I feel very strongly that every serious dance and movement student deserves an opportunity to investigate Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (L/BMA). It is part of basic dance and movement literacy. I have evolved a highly personal approach to the teaching of movement analysis. Without suggesting that you try to duplicate my specific methods of teaching this subject, I hope that these pages will provide a useful historical context and a clear overview of the possibilities I have explored.

As a professor of dance at the University of New Mexico from 1988 through 2004, it was one of my responsibilities — and genuine pleasures —to teach movement analysis to incoming undergraduate dance majors and minors during their first two semesters in the UNM dance program. During their precollege years, most of the students had learned to value inordinately the appearance of conformity, and most entered my courses wanting mainly to know the answers to the questions on which they would be tested. In class discussions they were initially willing to comment only when they felt certain they would be "right." To encourage the development of a more diverse and useful set of educational values, I created a two-semester sequence of movement analysis courses designed to facilitate (in the first semester) a process of self-discovery and (in the second) the acquisition of theoretical tools to be used in creative problem solving.

I invited students to participate in a process through which they could learn to understand and value their personal uniqueness. I then guided them through a process of applying the themes and concepts of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis as tools for self-initiated and personally meaningful change and growth.

Brief History of Movement Analysis

Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) was a movement educator, choreographer, dance company director, visual artist, architect, scientist, and philosopher. He was born in what is now the Slovak Republic, but he worked throughout Europe as a significant participant in some of the major artistic proceedings of his era, especially the development of modern dance. In Body Movement: Coping with the Environment, Irmgard Bartenieff talks about her former teacher:

He was in Germany during the Bauhaus and Expressionist periods, initiating and developing theatrical and recreational dance programs, schools and publications. In 1936, the Nazis forced him to stop, and he went to England, where he adapted his movement theories to wartime studies of factory workers, helped establish new schools for movement education and continued to publish his works. (1980, ix)

Laban was fascinated primarily with the process of movement rather than its outcomes, and he and his colleagues and successors have given us a complete theoretical system through which one can experience, understand, and describe movement in all its functional and expressive aspects. Laban's analytical theories (often called Labananalysis) are now categorized under the major headings of Effort, Shape, and Space Harmony. Any human movement can be viewed in terms of:

The inner attitudes which it reveals (Effort)

The process through which the body changes its form (Shape)

Its relationship to personal and/or general space (Space Harmony)

Labananalysis also includes Motif Writing, a graphic symbol language representing all major Effort, Shape, and Space concepts, which is used to record the observations of a Labananalyst. Motif writing can also be used to create a movement score that can then be realized; that is, it can be used prescriptively as well as descriptively.

Irmgard Bartenieff (1980-1981) was born in Berlin, Germany, where she was a student of biology, visual art, and dance before meeting Laban in 1925. She studied with the master and many of his collaborators and became a teacher of dance and of Labanotation (the system of precise and detailed movement notation for which Laban is best known, and which is related to but essentially different from Labananalysis; see Chapter 11). In 1936, Bartenieff fled from Germany to America, where she taught Labanotation and became a physical therapist. In 1943, she became a member of the New York City-based Dance Notation Bureau. In 1978, she founded the Laban Institute for Movement Studies (LIMS), also based in New York City (known since her death as the Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies). A separate organization, the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB), was formed to promote the use of Labanotation. It might be said that the DNB deals mostly with the quantitative aspects of movement documentation while LIMS deals primarily with the qualitative or expressive aspects of human movement.

Unlike Laban, Bartenieff was not so much a theoretician as she was a hands-on practitioner, more concerned with investigating the unique movement patterns of an individual than with creating a conceptual framework. Nonetheless, her work (as refined by several colleagues and successors) constitutes the fourth major subsystem of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis: Bartenieff Fundamentals (BF). Not only can we perceive a movement event in terms of Effort, Shape, or Space, but we can also choose to look at it in terms of what is occurring on the level of the body. That is, we can perceive a person's body-level connectivity: the kinetic chains he or she activates to make movement more or less efficient. We can also consider such fundamental issues as:

Where within the body is movement initiated?

How does it follow through to complete the phrase?

How does it sequence through the body?

What parts of the body are active and which are frequently held?

What is the prevailing body attitude?

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a former student of Bartenieff's, has created a system of movement investigation, healing, and re-education known as Body Mind Centering. In recent years, several Certified Laban Movement Analysts — notably, Martha Eddy and Janice Meaden — have also become Body Mind Practitioners, and Cohen has generously allowed them to integrate many of her concepts and language into L/BMA.

Bartenieff Fundamentals, Body Mind Centering, Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, various forms of yoga, and other systems of fundamental movement awareness and repatterning — often known collectively as somatic studies — have been embraced by increasing numbers of dancers over the past three decades. Somatic studies encourage the student to pay attention to the messages the body is sending to the brain, to honor physical sensation and bodily wisdom. Because many of our traditional practices in ballet, jazz, modern dance, and other Western theatrical dance forms have encouraged an external approach to learning (i.e., copying the teacher, looking at ourselves in the mirror, concerning ourselves with "correct" positions and lines), the inclusion of somatic studies in dance training programs has begun to produce much-needed balance for many teachers and students.

One of the overarching themes of L/BMA is the need to balance the Inner with the Outer, or — as Peggy Hackney (2000) states it — "a lively interplay between inner connectivity and outer expressivity" (34). Western cultures have become increasingly concerned with the external image a person conveys; technological developments have also caused young people to become increasingly disembodied in the accomplishment of numerous tasks, which can happen instantly. Somatic studies remind us that physiological and psychological processes are essentially the same for us as they were for countless generations of our ancestors. Through somatic practices, we learn to honor the fundamental and timeless truths of what it is to be human; we develop body-mind patterns that are harmonious with our lifelong needs; and we learn to move (i.e., live) in ways that are healthful and regenerative.

My Personal Journey

My own process of self-discovery and self-acceptance — through which I was gradually able to overcome physical and psychological limitations and move forward in both my personal life and my career — was profoundly influenced by my study of Effort/Shape, Space Harmony, and Bartenieff Fundamentals. My exploration of these theories began almost thirty years ago when Peggy Hackney, whom I believe to be the world's foremost authority on the work of Irmgard Bartenieff, joined my professional Bill Evans Dance Company and the faculty of my school of modern dance, Dance Theatre Seattle. My investigation of L/BMA continued in the classes of Janet Hamburg, who taught in my Bill Evans Summer Institutes of Dance in the 1980s and early 1990s, and was more recently enhanced under Peggy Hackney again, with Janice Meaden, Pam Schick, and Ed Groff, in the Integrated Movement Studies Certification Program at the University of Utah. I am deeply and forever indebted to those extraordinary teachers and colleagues, who have become role models for the teacher I am and the teacher I wish to become.

Since 1976, when Peggy Hackney began sharing L/BMA concepts and practices in the day-to-day activities of my modern dance company and school, I have been evolving my own integration of L/BMA, modern dance technique, and choreography. In The Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering, Linda Hartley articulates my own experience at the point in my life when I first encountered L/BMA:

My instinct told me that I was all up in the air. I needed to place my feet firmly on the ground and relocate myself clearly in my body. I began to dance as a means to both embody and express who I am. I found I was also on the path of knowing in a new way that which I am. As I explored ways of making deeper contact with my body, my body was teaching me a new awareness of myself. (1995, xxii)

In 1978, another colleague/mentor entered my life: Karen Clippinger, one of the world's leading dance kinesiologists, became a faculty member of my Seattle school.

Ms. Clippinger helped me understand that, as she said in Principles of Dance Training.

An application of scientific principles of training to dance is needed. Close work among the dance, scientific and medical communities is necessary to evaluate old methods and develop new methods. There is much work to be done to sort out the valuable dance principles which have been passed down through generations from the myths. Such a process can only yield better methods of dance training and provide a beginning for more effective injury prevention. (1988, 82)

The combination of hands-on applied dance science (which I learned from Karen) and the application of Laban/Bartenieff concepts (which I learned from Peggy) gave me a whole new lease on life as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer. Through the application of knowledge generated by my studies with Clippinger and Hackney, and numerous others in succeeding years, I have become a healthier and more fully functioning dancer; my choreography has become regenerative rather than destructive to my dancers' minds and bodies; and my students have learned how to develop the tools to take ownership of their own movement and of their well-being and expressivity.

In my years at UNM, I had the good fortune of collaborating with Virginia Wilmerding, another leading dance kinesiologist and exercise scientist. We took each other's classes and coordinated our teaching methods and course content to serve our students' dance science and somatics needs as we perceived them.

Movement Analysis I

Early in the first semester, I would share with students an overview of L/BMA, by discussing its overarching themes, balancing:

Function and Expression

Stability and Mobility

Coping (Doing) and Indulging (Being)

Exertion and Recuperation

A concern for the Container (the Outer) with a concern for the Contents (the Inner)

Students would discuss the relevance of these big ideas by making specific references to their current lives, and we would improvise around each idea.

Because I wanted my students to make deep contact with and learn from their bodies, my first-semester analysis course was organized around the six basic evolutionary Developmental Movement Patterns (Hartley 1995). In two-hour sessions held twice a week, we discussed and experienced these patterns, as they begin with cellular respiration at the moment of conception and proceed into early childhood through the overlapping stages of navel radiation, spinal, homologous, homo-lateral, and contralateral patterns of total body coordination. We studied and experienced these same neuromuscular patterns of body connectivity within the context of Bartenieff Fundamentals, as they serve us in our adult lives, as Patterns of Total Body Organization (Hackney 2000): Breath (both lung and cellular), Core-Distal, Head-Tail, Upper-Lower, Body-Half, and Cross-Lateral. We discovered that images derived from these patterns can travel at the speed of light to organize and integrate the entire body-mind in an instant to function more efficiently, different patterns facilitating different actions.

I assigned extensive readings in the books written by Bartenieff (1980) and Hackney (2000), and in journal articles written by numerous Labananalysts and educational theorists, as a preparation for my slow, gentle, thorough, and hands-on teaching of movement practices designed by Bartenieff, her colleagues, and successors. I would begin most classes by asking students to lie on their backs, close their eyes, and travel in their minds' eyes and proprioceptors through their bodies, acknowledging and savoring sensations and awarenesses as they made this leisurely journey. I would guide them with both anatomically and/or developmentally precise language and subjective imagery.

Later, I would invite students to improvise around each movement pattern, "listening" to their bodies' needs as they drew on the concepts and imagery I had shared with them to guide their explorations and choices. They moved sometimes in silence and sometimes to music or their own vocal/body percussion sounds. Their improvisations progressed from internal breath-related changes, through small gestures and stationary actions, all the way to large motions through space. As they improvised, they examined the personal relevance of the concepts we were studying.

I assigned "study buddies," so that each student had a semester-long partner who provided intellectual and emotional support throughout the journey on which they had embarked. I frequently confirmed my belief that "it is a gift to be perceived," and students became increasingly appreciative of the thoughtful, caring, and honest feedback they received from their study buddies, other class members, and me. I devoted time in each class for students to reflect on their investigations and derive meanings from those reflections. I would ask them to record these meanings in their journals and share them with their study buddies and/or other members of the class.

I encouraged students to approach their investigations of these fundamental body patterns with their whole selves, engaging the four functions of the psyche — thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuiting — to perceive which body organization patterns were fully accessible to them as well as which patterns could be more available. Study ...