A Q&A with the dance educator and researcher from Greensboro.
What She Does
I do courses in teacher preparation (at UNCG) to prepare public school dance educators. I taught dance in schools before this job and continued to do demonstrations for many years. We have a program on the graduate level for continuing dance educators who want to continue to teach in public schools and get their master's degrees.
My research is in the general vicinity of dance education, most broadly looking at issues having to do with teaching and learning in dance. How do we make decisions about what to teach? I've done a lot of research, interviewing young people in terms of what their dance education experience means to them, connecting questions in dance education to larger issues in the culture.
How She Got Her Start
I started dancing quite late as a senior in high school. I had danced in some high school variety shows, and the community theater was offering a course in dance drama. You were supposed to have had three years of dance experience to get in, which I did not have, and the teacher said, "Well, let me see what you can do." She decided I was creative, so I could participate. I started training at that point.
Sharing Traditions
I have a 5-year-old grandson, and playing with him is the thing that takes me most outside of myself. We have lots of ritual games and make believe. If my grandson is a robot today, then I have to enter the world of robots to connect. I'm the grandma robot.
I've started taking him to dance performances. I took him to see "The Wizard of Oz" at the Community Theatre (of Greensboro) in the fall, and that was the most fun when he turned to me about halfway through the first act and said, "I like this show."
I wish there were more dance performances designed for child audiences. That's been something I have tried to get folks interested in doing for a very long time around here. And 45 minutes is fine (for a performance to last). You don't need an hour and a half, and there needs to be some interactive moments.
Favorite Style of Dance
It's always been what we used to call modern and now we call contemporary. There is such incredible diversity within contemporary dance. It doesn't have a single set vocabulary. It can incorporate ballet, hip-hop, street dance and folk forms.
Teaching as Art
I approach my writing as an art form. I care about the rhythm of the sentences. I care about how the parts are put together.
When I do presentations at conferences, it's a kind of performance. My teaching is a kind of art, and being a dancer in the broader sense has to do with how we perceive the world. It's perceiving the world kinesthetically in terms of my body, so that I try to pay attention to my body -- feeling things in my body when I look at people, things in the world and how I'm connecting, feeling a response.
What She Teaches Students
We want them to be able to think critically and reflectively about their work as dance educators and about the content of dance as well. To not just say, "Oh, I'll teach my students how to do plies." But, what's important about this, why should the students learn this, what good is it? We want them to think about things in new ways, to not just take what's been handed down to them from their dance teachers. We want to graduate people that will keep asking questions that will lead to new answers.
Importance of Dance
My immediate interest is its importance as part of a basic education for young people. The arts are considered a basic education area by most education policy makers, although the arts are usually the first to go when there are budget cuts. So, they are not treated as basic in the same way that other basic subjects are. I think that's largely because dance education in schools is not connected to getting a job for most young people. Basic education to me means having to do with being a broadly educated person who can think critically and creatively.
What dance offers that's different than some of the other arts is the kind of engagement of the body. If all we have in life is what we do for a living, our income, certainly that's an important part of having a meaningful life, but for most people, it's not sufficient. This is why as a community we do other things that make life worth living. The arts can help people enter different worlds, and when they return to the world they normally live in, to see that world differently. It gives us new lenses for looking at the world, to see ourselves as capable of creating and having an impact.
-- As told to Erin McClanahan Rainwater, eringrey718@yahoo.com
