Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, I value the personal responsibilities of awareness to the inner directions the students have in realizing that the body is a source of knowledge that informs kinesthetic awareness. I encourage students to understand how movement can reveal a state of mind. By analyzing their own experiences, integrating mind and body, dancers become experts of their own capacity. I encourage creativity, autonomy, sense of personal responsibility and understanding of ones kinesthetic growth.
Moving Into Wholeness
Moving Into Wholeness addresses patterns of helplessness, ambivalence, and inactivity. Dance movement interventions help individuals internalize a positive self-concept as well as gain physical and emotional control. Improvisation helps to promote this investigation of self and body. I use imagery to create a different reality for the students in hopes that the students can transcend beyond their own tendencies and habits, into a greater use of efficiency and bodily possibilities. I encourage students to focus on the feeling of the movement rather than simply on its outward appearance.
The goals are to help individuals achieve greater self-awareness and a positive sense of well-being. The idea is that through authentic movement, improvisation, trust exercises, and group discussions; one can express oneself and come into contact with the conscious and unconscious parts of their personality. This contact leads to accepting one’s self for who they are. Moving Into Wholeness is based on the idea that the body and mind are interrelated.
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Movement Studies
Movement Studies exposes students to movement composition through the lens of Intermedia art-making, exposing students to movement composition, through improvisation, with an emphasis towards connections with other artistic media such as drawing, writing, music, and video. Focus is on the processes, rather than finished products in order to expand and broaden the range of possibilities for choreographic exploration.
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Dancing Techniques
My class uses a combination of experiential investigations, body mind connections, engaging in a holistic context, with the support of the Bartenieff and Laban fundamentals. Focusing on the four inter-related categories of Body/ Effort/Shape/Space, I give combinations and across the floor work that builds the students’ stamina. The exploration of big movement patterns helps to facilitate a sense of moving through space, which focuses on spatial intent, weight transference, effort intention, initiation and sequencing. The use of floor work and level changes is key in developing core support, finding the body’s center of weight while releasing in and out of the floor.
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