Teaching

The following values shape my teaching and my dance making: 1.) affirming the potential to lead in each individual, 2.) facilitating creative exploration and artistic discovery, 3.) contextualizing the world of contemporary dancemaking and 4.) validating dance as a creative practice that produces knowledge.

My ultimate goal as a teacher and dance professional is to instill the notion that dancing bodies are sources of power, ability, creativity and intelligence.  Dancing as a practice and as a process requires rigorous principles and a commitment to navigate ever-shifting relationships of ideas in the body, ideas in the dancemaking process, and the ideas that contextualize cultures of dancemaking.  When dancers learn to trust their own intrinsic wisdom, knowledge and instincts they become curious and open to a plethora of creative and critical practices, discoveries and relationships.

For almost 30 years I have been training, challenging, and making art as a performer and choreographer. In my dance technique classes I introduce practices that enhance perspectives about the definition of the dancing body. In my technique classes “the body” is seen as a set of imaginary relationships between physical locations, initiations, directions, intentions and spatial organizations within a self or between people. In the studio worlds I hold and facilitate, the performer is challenged to think while dancing, to use the body in space as an extension of thinking, and to tap that thinking body as a creative source.