Marlena Penney Oden Photo courtesy of Kate Weare Company; photo by Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang
Teaching is a passion for me. I love being in the studio with my students. I learn what to teach from them. I also feel that my life in rehearsal guides my teaching. I hope to give students a base of curiosity and love of what they are capable of as movers. Whether it be moving a hand or flying through space.
I absolutely love teaching! Teaching gives me an opportunity to share my experiences with other dancers, not by talking about them, but by sharing them through physicality. You can’t get that dialogue in any other form.
I started teaching when I was 16 at my dance studio back home. The first class I ever taught was for 25 boys! I learned how to manage a room very quickly. I continued to teach while I was in college as a way to work over the summers. That is when I really found a passion for it, when I realized how much I could inform and inspire younger dancers. Since I did not have exposure to concert dance as a kid, I feel a responsibility to share my experiences with dancers that were like me.
The role of teaching in your dance career:
Teaching was one of the main ways that I supported my career in California. I taught a range of styles from teaching creative dance in public school cafeterias where I literally had to clean Cheerios and milk off lunch tables, fold them up and move them before we could even start dancing; to teaching passionate, talented teens where I saw them off to college dance programs; to teaching college and professional level adults in beautiful studios where it seemed that I had every resource available to me. I was ready and willing to do it all, and in the beginning, you have to be.
While I’m no longer teaching, I don’t think that kind of teaching-mind ever leaves you. It takes a very thoughtful, methodical approach to plan and teach a very good, not to mention, fun class. That beginning-middle-end methodical approach is great training for so many things. The confidence and, for lack of a better word “sales skills," that it takes to walk into a room of people and convince them to do this thing with you (and keep coming back!) is a powerful thing. That is an awesome power and one to be taken with great care. While I’m no longer inside the classroom, I use my “inside the classroom” skills to program and devise curriculum and mentor teachers and I hope that I’m passing on the same sense of care, respect, and pride for, not only, the art of dance but for the fine art of teaching it.
Advice to young dancers on teaching, the role of teaching in their dance lives ahead, and becoming a well-prepared teacher:
Here are my thoughts on this: Teaching is hard, really hard, but it is also extremely rewarding. If you want to maximize your opportunities and enjoy a fruitful dance career, I think it pays it start developing your voice as a teacher sooner rather than later. Investigating your teaching voice also serves you in that as you investigate what is important for you to convey to your students in the classroom, you start to understand what is important to you – what YOUR stamp is…what makes YOU unique and special. Digging deeper only makes you a better teacher, a smarter dancer, more powerful performer, a multi-dimensional human.
I also learned a lot about what kind of teacher I wanted to become by knowing what kind of teacher I didn’t want to become. Knowing where you land on both sides of the line is important. I would suggest jotting things down after taking class:
- What did you love about that class? Was it the energy the teacher provided? The structure? The technique? The aesthetic?
- What was successful? Why?
- What wasn’t successful? Why?
- What was the progression of class like? Did it work for your body and why?
- How does the teacher use the space/facings/etc?
- How did the teacher utilize music?
- What kind of language did the teacher use? Dynamic anatomical language? Technical vocabulary?
How do you get there: Most of us start teaching by young students. Talk to someone who is a master Creative Dance teacher and start watching him or her teach. Work with them, observe them, and absorb them. I became a much better adult technique teacher after I started teaching creative dance to young children. The amount of planning and detailed creative thought that went into crafting those classes was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’d ever done. And, I’ll tell you, sometimes the scariest thing to me was walking into a room of 3-4 year olds who were ready to dance! There were times that I would have rather faced a cage full of lions than a room full of 4 year olds in leotards and tights! Facing that fear, and planning so fastidiously only makes you a better, stronger teacher.
Find a teacher or two that you admire or enjoy taking class from; introduce yourself if they don’t already know you; take them out for tea, coffee, pick their brains, talk to them about their process. Where/how did they get their start as a teacher? What was most difficult? What was most rewarding? Where did they pool their resources? Can you set-up an exchange with them? Just start talking with them. You’ll be surprised how open people are to your ideas. I still do this even though I’m not teaching anymore. Just this month, I’ve had 10+ coffee dates with teachers/dancers/choreographers – picking their brains about where THEY are, what THEY want out of dance/out of their careers, where do they think the conversation in dance (teaching, making work, the role and voice of the dancer, the dancers role in getting credited for work, etc) needs to go. This kind of open dialogue has been helpful for me about where we’re at, where we want to be, and how we might get there.
On becoming well prepared and learning from others: Take notes, takes notes, take notes! I was looking through my teaching notebooks from five/six years ago and I could still, believe it or not, teach those classes! I still have the songs that each phrase was set to, the breakdown of counts, which wall/direction/facing things were/positions, if there was a ritard on a particular count, etc. Kind of sick, meticulous note taking…maybe that’s why I never had a day off! Moral of the story: take good notes – you might need them some day when you want to revisit material or look at the how the arc of your teaching has evolved or remember the moments that were created in the room with those people doing something that you initiated and help to create! I see those notebooks as time capsules and I love every one of them.
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