TEACHING STATEMENT

When I think about dance as a method of connectivity, I think about repetition. I think about how many plies or drop swings or triplets have been done throughout the entire history of dance.

One solitary tilted torso does not amount to much. It is through the occasionally monotonous and drudging repetition of the tilt that it becomes profound. We notice the subtlety of the tilt when we practice it daily. We find our personal anatomical technique. We identify and work with our asymmetries. We understand that in a sea of tilted torsos, no two are exactly alike. We are not one flat thing reproduced.

In my classes I demand precision and exactitude not as a mirror of my own dancing or any other person’s dancing, but as a personal commitment from each student. The dancing I am excited to see in my class weaves from body to body to environment to history to future to dreams to desires to music to the passage of time to the unexpected balance on one leg to the exhausted conclusion. The point of my class is dancing and the point of the dancing in my class is as a means of researching one’s own personal values with regards to rigor, spaciousness, affect, ornamentation, and style.

I teach dance classes. Usually ballet classes or modern classes. Also choreography and improvisation classes. Always classes that emphasize translatable movement concepts such as shifting weight, changing speed and direction, cantilevering on and off balance, and openhearted commitment to the work, the failure, the joy, the re-learning, the DANCING of it all.

WHAT I TEACH
I teach a Cecchetti-based ballet class informed by my years studying Janet Panetta’s framework of ballet for contemporary dancers.

I am an authorized instructor of Merce Cunningham Technique®.

I teach choreography as a research method, and compositional improvisation based on the emergent forms research of Susan Sgorbati.

RECENT COURSES TAUGHT (SELECTED):

Fall 2024 Semester, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Contemporary Technique IV
Composition II
Ballet Technique I-B/II: mixed level, dance majors and non-majors combined

Spring 2024 Semester, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Choreographic Laboratory: co-instructor with Associate Professor Paige Cunningham Caldarella, contemporary ballet/partnering focused
Dancing Techniques III/IV (Intermediate/Advanced): Block 2, Modern Technique
Choreographic Process II: Block 2, Choreography as Research Methodology

Fall 2023 Semester, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Dancing Techniques II (Intermediate): Block 3, Ballet Technique
Choreographic Process I: Block 3, Choreography as Research Methodology
”Dance Buffet”: introduction to multiple dance styles for the absolute beginner