The Essential Guide to Contemporary Dance Techniques
eBook - ePub

The Essential Guide to Contemporary Dance Techniques

Melanie Clarke

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eBook - ePub

The Essential Guide to Contemporary Dance Techniques

Melanie Clarke

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About This Book

The Essential Guide to Contemporary Dance Techniques explores the multifaceted learning processes and underlying principles behind the technical skills and abilities of a contemporary dancer. The depth and complexity of this challenging sensorial, intellectual, reflective and creative process is presented with clarity, to support every training dancer in achieving the most from their learning experiences. Insights into three major technical forms: Graham technique, Cunningham technique and Release-based technique, reveal the distinct approaches, processes and experiences possible in contemporary dance training. Essential technical and performance considerations are covered, including: breath; alignment; core activation; connectivity; dynamic qualities of motion; use of the body; use of space; action and finally, relationships to the audience. With personal contributions from respected teachers at top dance institutions, this practical guide offers a unique insight into the expectations and processes of professional training classes as well as the success you can achieve with them. With images from real-life technique classes and dynamic performances, this is an essential companion for all contemporary dance students.

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Publisher
Crowood
Year
2020
ISBN
9781785007002
CHAPTER 1

LEARNING CONTEMPORARY DANCE TECHNIQUE

THE EVOLUTION OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE

Contemporary dance is a broad and diverse art form despite its relatively short history. It arose in various parts of the world in the twentieth century as a liberation from the structures and aesthetic of ballet, as individuals searched for new forms of dance. As the body was freed from the corsets and morality of the nineteenth century, a more visceral and socially relevant theatrical performance became possible. Pioneers such as Ruth St Dennis and Ted Shawn, Rudolf Laban, Isadora Duncan and Loi Fuller worked to find new forms of theatrical expression, and instigated the foundations for a creative explosion in dance.
One hundred years later there is a wealth of avenues for movement exploration in terms of learning opportunities and creative possibilities. In the twenty-first century, individual expression, creativity and innovation are synonymous with contemporary dance as an art form. But what does that mean for the aspiring dancer? Dancing may be a spontaneous act of freedom of expression in everyone's life, but dance as an art form is a learnt and created act. Through educating ourselves in movement, we, as contemporary dancers, not only enable our movement possibilities to surpass the average, but we also develop our bodily awareness and understanding of movement.
Part of this learning is through contemporary technique classes, since, put very simply, learning a technique is learning a way to do things – providing yourself with the knowledge to be able to do something. But dance technique is not just one thing, but an array of approaches and methodologies akin to the array of artistic practices in contemporary dance. Dance technique is a physical learning process, and not only a bio-mechanical one. It is an experiential envelopment in a vast array of processes, practices, aesthetics and sensations.

LEARNING THROUGH EMBODIED PRACTICE

In contemporary dance educational programmes in the UK students usually do not study only one particular set of forms and structures – that is, one technique form – but have an experiential knowledge of diverse movement possibilities, and the particular application of these to diverse tasks and processes. Different schools, such as higher education conservatoires and university dance departments, approach this education in different ways. Many provide access to a range of techniques or a range of teachers with different backgrounds and approaches. Some programmes include supplementary training separate from what is called technique class, such as fitness classes, conditioning, Pilates, yoga, somatic practices, experiential anatomy. Improvization practices can be considered as technical training or as creative practice, or both.
Whatever the structural approach, as a dancer you have to discover yourself within the application of your bodily movement to the approaches presented to you. You need to learn, for example, how you can understand the sensations of your hip socket functioning, and how you use that embodied knowledge to move your legs and torso in particular ways in different practices, with different uses of energy in time and space for particular expressive or performative purposes that you generate or in which you find meaning. Not a simple task! It takes time and dedication to achieve this for every aspect of yourself as an integrated and performative whole. Although it can seem daunting at times, understanding what you are trying to achieve can help to make sense of the process of learning, and how you support yourself within it.
Fig. 2: Release class taught by Zoi Dimitriou, featuring dancers Alice Lebant, Valeria Famularo and Carolina Ravaioli; Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. JAMES KEATES
There are no direct pathways from learning one technical practice to performing within that style, so the contemporary dancer needs to be technically able, but also adaptable to current and future creative practices and performance modes in an open and ever-changing genre. The very open-endedness of contemporary dance as an artistic practice can actually throw into question what good contemporary dance technique even means, as it is not an end in itself. Current choreographic practices in contemporary dance utilize the performers’ creativity through improvization and task-based movement creation, and so often embodied creative decision-making can be desired as much as physical facility and/or a particular movement skill set.
The requirement to be not only a strong technician, but also a creative practitioner implies the possibility to use what is learnt in creative ways. Learning technical skills should then not prevent creative choice, but should enable the dancer to physically achieve the creative vision (which often evolves from creative processes) of others (or themselves).
Thus, learnt movement skills need to be open, accessible to creative exploration, and this requires education into movement potentials and physical strategies rather than the simple ability to repeat movement patterns. In other words, the steps, and picking up steps, is not the aim. Remembering movement phrases is a useful skill in the learning process, but it is not the goal. The ultimate achievement is to acquire body management and performance skills through experience. Experiencing dance is to use all aspects of yourself: you use the physical abilities of your body, the abilities of your brain for pattern recognition, retaining concepts, reflecting on experiences and connecting ideas together, and you use your personal approach to expression and communication.
Fig. 3: Students in a Graham class taught by Geneviève Grady, featuring dancers Kirbie Franks and Jessy MacKay; Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. JAMES KEATES
Knowledge and understanding comes from the integration of all these things within the experience of dancing. Dance practice is an embodied practice whereby you, as a whole person, are the thing you represent, the dance. What you gain in the practice of learning in, about and through dance is knowledge about yourself as a dancer, as well as dance as an activity and as an art form. The learning is not just the doing, but a reflection on how the dance is experienced to be produced by the dancer. You become the repository of all your learning and experience, and you can call on all, or any of that to facilitate your performative intention. In this way dance can be said to be an embodied practice.
Fig. 4: Floor exercises in a technique class, featuring dancers Anna Broome, Pagan Hunt, Federica Bertani, Mitchell Davis, Laure Dubanet and Alice Lovrinic; Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. JAMES KEATES

DANCE TECHNIQUE

Dance technique teachers have a responsibility to enable an education in dance, as well as the acquisition of physical skills and abilities – but how to do that is not set in stone. There are many named approaches to learning contemporary dance technique. Various forms of technique were developed through the twentieth century by particular artists with particular creative visions. Initially these technical forms were to establish an aesthetic basis for an individual’s choreographic practice, but these forms are still widely utilized in dance training as methods for accessing dance skills. Then dance technique practices arose that used an approach to technique teaching that was not attached to a choreographic vision. In the twenty-first century all styles of technical training are adapting to the demands of the profession in order to equip dancers with open technical skills and creative potentials.
Individual teachers have the possibility of developing a personal teaching approach, which means they do not have to teach as they were taught, but can themselves adapt and make choices to facilitate the learning of particular groups of individuals. Due to this professional freedom, dance technique forms are approached as a basis to teach from, rather than an imposed structure. Techniques are not historical records of previous choreographic styles, but working practices in the pursuit of dance skills. Given this variability on approach, student dancers are exposed to a range of practices and approaches. Experiencing differentiation in learning can support a dancer’s adaptability and creative potential.
However, it can make learning dance a complex and potentially confusing process. The contemporary dancer does not just need to execute different steps, but must be open to different approaches to learning, different physical sensations, and different performance modes. Understanding the background and aesthetic basis of different forms, as well as the approach to learning and performing embedded in the basis of different forms of technical practice, can support the learner to make these adaptations and access the broad perspective of contemporary dance.
In this book three distinct approaches to learning contemporary dance will be discussed: Graham, Cunningham and Release-based techniques. There are many different forms and practices of dance technique developed by choreographers or by teachers as methods of enabling dancers to experience particular ways of moving, and to gain skills. There can be as many approaches as there are teachers teaching them, as there is no set form for what contemporary dance is, and thus no one way to learn it.
Some technical practices have been used for many years by influential choreographers and teachers such as Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon and Lester Horton, and their practices have become established as technique forms with designated names (usually the choreographer’s surname). Other practices, such as Release-based technique, are various in appearance but bonded by a set of principles. There are also approaches that are an amalgamation of ideas and methods by individual teachers, or new and emerging technical styles such as Flying Low and Gaga Technique.
Fig. 5: Dancer Anna Broome; Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. JAMES KEATES
Individual teachers are generally free to choose what and how to teach, and so each individual teacher’s approach can be distinct. Some follow a particular lineage and teach from a named perspective with a particular set of concerns, although how they go about teaching it will still be reliant on their personal experiences, and the context in which they relate to their students.
There is no syllabus for contemporary technique as...

Table of contents