I’m currently wrapping up teaching spring semester at
Middlebury College. As a freelance
choreographer and dancer who is blessed right now to hold a temporary academic
position, my mind frequently ricochets between the fortune of my temporary
financial stability and the oppression of working for a private school that
exemplifies the problematic American capitalist education system.
Though I could easily dedicate this blog to the anger that
arises in me from witnessing privilege, cloaked as education, I will instead
focus it on what I learned this year from the subject matter I engaged in with
my students. For though the system is
deeply flawed, individual students, conversations, and colleagues, continuously
rose above the party line this spring and reminded me that education is
on-going for all of us.
When the semester started I thought I was teaching 2 classes
that would have little cross over; Anatomy/Kinesiology, and a course I designed
called Ethics/Aesthetics/Body. (I also
taught advanced technique, choreographed a solo on a Sr Dance Major, advised two Sr thesis projects,
performed my own solo work locally and internationally, danced as a guest
artist with Richard Move, and choreographed a few scenes for a film… but those
experiences are for other blogs)
These two classes, one on how we feel, articulate, and move
the gross matter of our bodies, and one on how we perceive, judge and value
ourselves and each other, seemed highly oppositional when I made the
syllabi. The ethics course is deeply
rooted in my graduate research into gender representation, which is a field
that looks at everything one does as
evidence of gender expression, but decidedly does not engage biology in the
discussion. Anatomy/Kinesiology is designed to explore
the opposite, not what we do with our raced/gendered/(dis)abled bodies, but what
we are; energy organized into mass, saturated with sensation, separated into
muscles, bones, connective tissue, and systems with fancy names.
But as the semester wore on I noticed that while the
readings and discussions may have been based in different disciplines, the
point of the teaching was the same. I
kept coming back to one thing; what do you see or experience so regularly that
it is invisible to you?
In Anatomy/Kinesiology
I found that many students had never considered their bodies except for on
occasions when they were injured. Most
of them had no concept of the beauty and complexity of the physical systems
they utilize everyday to get from bed to class.
All of us develop physical habits that simplify our mind/body
connection. These habits can be extremely helpful or extremely detrimental to
our well being, but unless we know what we are doing (from slouching, to always
standing with our weight on our left leg, to grinding our teeth) and that there are other options, we cannot
determine the number of choices we are denying ourselves. It is impossible to see the value of our body’s intelligence when we are entirely attached to the way we
have patterned our selves through repetition.
Repetition is also what transforms our various gender performances into our sense of self. Repetition of the practice of confidence or
victimization creates our personality and our concept of our role in the
world. Culture’s repetitions in the form
of mass-media-marketing-strategies, capitalist government systems that support
a particular family structure, and the on-going struggle for equal wages for
equal work among different classes, genders, nationalities and races of people,
create assumptions for all of us within a system of, “the way things
are.” Unconsciously, we fit ourselves
into these systems and pattern ourselves in line with, or against their
standards. In this value-laden
conception of self, we again cannot determine the value of our heart’s
intelligence, and/or our attachments to the way we have patterned our selves through
both conscious and unconscious repetition, until we can see that our habits are actually choices.
Frequently in my years of teaching dance related subjects, I
have found that the best of what I have to offer the students I work with comes
from my 18-year (and counting) study of vinyasa yoga. This semester proved to be no exception, in
fact Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga even have a single word for this shockingly interdisciplinary habitual body/mind; Samskara.
Samskara defines physical and mental patterning as not only the
product of this lifetime, but a response to the accumulation of multiple
lifetimes of habit building. Whether or not you
believe in reincarnation, the habits of multiple lifetimes are surely what
create the cultural/social traditions that enmesh, condition and define us. Samskara explains how the habits of consciousness we develop in this lifetime, which manifest as our physical posture, intertwine with cultural, raced,
gendered, classed memory causing our bodies and minds to be subjected to
infinitely more unconscious instructions than conscious ones.
Whether we are
talking about tucking our pelvis under as a weakness in our lower back and
strain on our hip flexors, or a conditioned response to being told that our
butt is too big to be in a certain kind of dance class, we are talking about a
detrimental physical/mental habit that the practitioner needs to become aware
of, before they can respond to it in a healthy way.
If the realization of pelvic miss-alignment comes through a conversation
about the relationship between the curved sacrum and pelvis or an articulation
of the lingering Western European dominance in popular dance and marketing
aesthetics, it doesn’t really matter.
What the student needs to do is to pause their habitual reactions to what they are experiencing long
enough to actually feel their own pelvis.
Where is it right now?
“Why am I doing
what I am doing?” is an excellent question, but useless, unless one first knows
what they are doing and that, more often than not, it is a choice.
One cannot make a
change unless one knows where one is to begin with. That requires listening, feeling, and not holding on so tightly to what you think you know that you cannot see that, "you are a victim of the rules you live by." (Jenny Holzer).
Our embodied experience is contextual and always in motion. The body's inescapability as our main sensory means of experiencing the world we live in, and its constant state of change, can teach us that mental constructs such as
It is interesting to teach in a liberal arts institution. There are a lot of ideas bouncing around. But in terms of giving the students an opportunity to actually learn something, I am increasingly grateful that I teach an embodied discipline... mostly so that I don't need to justify teaching meditation. All this liberal arts education is pretty useless with out enough space in it for students to occasionally pause and witness the journey they are on. It is through this understanding, that we are all changing constantly, and that all of life is a process, that students will be able to manifest their own power to contribute to/conduct that flow.
