CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, July 09, 2019

Op-Ed: The Dance Class Video Craze Is Out of Control

Dance Magazine: A few weeks ago, a friend of mine attended a professional contemporary class one morning, and later that evening perused Facebook to find that the teacher had shared a video of her dancing a phrase from class. A successful and professional working dancer, she was horrified to see a video of herself online that she had never given permission to be used, or even been approached about.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think that if a teacher were to want to film one of their classes for any reason, it is imperative that the students in the class know they are being filmed prior to signing up for the class (if it is a one-off class) or prior to the start of the class (if it is on a consistent day) so that they can choose for themselves whether or not they want themselves filmed, and they can know to perform to a standard they want seen on video. Like the author stated, I think this can become very problematic when these nonconsensual videos are used to judge whether or not someone is deserving of a job. The point of taking classes is to learn and get better at something and being filmed when trying to learn can impede how well the information is being transferred, because the students might be too caught up in trying to look good for the video. If there is a culture of teachers filming their students without permission, this can make it so students never know whether or not they are being filmed, causing them to struggle to learn more in all their classes. It is important to be able to learn in an environment where you don’t have to fear making mistakes, and teachers filming their classes makes this impossible.