Dance Magazine: Have you ever started class lying on the floor, eyes closed, listening as the teacher cues breath, imagery, or small movements, and found yourself craning your neck to peek around the room? Trying to figure out what the teacher meant, what everyone else was doing, what you were supposed to look like?
You’re not alone. That moment is so common, and so revealing.
3 comments:
Being able to have a strong inner feedback leads from where and how you learned from. Having a strong and supportive teacher means the world between being able to make confident choices instead of hesitation and faltering choices. It is almost impossible to walk away from an atmosphere where every move you make feels like a wrong one and how you should have done it another way. Being able to take that time and build a strong inner dialogue or feedback is a blessing that is often not able to be done. I think this is hard for some people who put their own success on the success of their students. There is too much reliance on the students to succeed and being overbearing and micromanaging or not setting them up for success is a mark of a bad teacher. Creating a space where you can make decisions while not being second guessed is good.
I think that by far, the worst thing we lose when we do not cultivate inner feedback, is that we forget how to listen to our bodies when they tell us that something is wrong. I think this is a culture that is very pervasive at this school and in this program, as I have heard many people wave off serious-sounding symptoms, or events that should at the very least require an urgent care visit, because they feel like they’re too busy. There’s a very strong culture in theatre in general that “the show must go on”, and I think that the worst way that this applies to our mentalities can be in how we let ourselves fall to the wayside in order to make a production smoother. I’m not sure I have a perfect solution to this issue, but I hope that we can soon start a dialogue about why ignoring bad things won’t make them go away.
One of my closest friends in high school was a dancer, she put so much physical and mental strain on herself to work up to expectations in her classes and performances and on the team, it felt so crazy to watch. This concept of inner feedback seems so much healthier, and it requires a certain level of self awareness that as a population we should probably all work on anyways. So much of dance has become focused on cosmetics rather than the skills and movement. I see these patterns in casting and hiring too. A lot of recent entertainment I’ve seen considers aesthetics for skilled roles like dancers at par with their technique, where I don’t think it’s necessary to use that as a factor. I think so much of the dance industry is incredibly focused on cosmetics, and beauty standards rooted in bigotry, and I sincerely hope that this kind of individual work on self perception and inner feedback is helpful to breaking that standard across the industry.
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