Articulating Experience
By Jan Erkert, Author of Harnessing the Wind, The Art of Teaching Modern Dance
I spent my career making dances in Chicago, so as a city girl, I didn’t know much about nature. Suddenly, a yearning appeared to be away from cement and small spaces, so for a year I moved to five stunning acres of sand dunes and trees. I began to settle into the woods; the fresh, pine smell and the bold, solid shapes of the trees escorted me on daily walks. One day I picked up a book called 101 Trees, Indiana and suddenly the shapes became more distinct. I began to differentiate between sassafras, black gum, shagbark hickory, honey locust, paw paw, and sycamores. I loved the sound of the names and began to sort out the relationships of the trees to place and ground. I made connections between leaves and bark. The process of naming of the trees provided just as much pleasure as the sensation garnered from being with the trees. And, through the naming, my knowledge of the trees crystalized and expanded, thus altering my experience. This is not to say that the experience itself did not possess specificity and clarity, the crystals just existed at a cellular level. My dogs continued to be more attuned to the smell.
In my book, Harnessing the Wind, The Art of Teaching Modern Dance, I start the acknowledgement with “Jumping off a cliff was far easier then writing a book. Little did I know what I was getting into when I entered the world of words.” Words attract me because they are concrete … specific, and words are the polar opposite to dancing. Perhaps this is why I am compelled to write. It solidifies the ephemeral. Snowmen out of snowflakes.
I fear writing too. When I was in the process of publishing the book, I couldn’t give it up to the publisher. I was used to changing my dances in every performance. The dancers and the audiences changed the dance as well. It was always in motion. A book is set, stuck, rigid, and placed in one moment without the possibility of change. I long to re-edit the book now, add new pieces of knowledge I have sorted out since the book was published, but it is caught in a moment of time much like photography. The arc of time and space is different too. As a performer, I am used to applause…immediate satisfaction after offering a gift. The book has a different agenda. I have received emails from Australia, China, Spain…. five, ten years after writing the book. The applause has a longer time span, and so it becomes a different interaction with the audience.
Why a book about teaching dance? Teaching has been the core of my career in dance….it is in my blood. I know teaching through the daily-ness of failures, successes, aha moments, and difficult students who occupy too much brain space. Selfishly, I wanted to start a conversation about teaching. I wanted us to question every assumption, honor and un-do histories and re-imagine how we might teach a person to dance. As a teacher, I struggled to figure out how to assist students in arriving at themselves without the tensions and habits I adopted and had to shed. I wondered if that was even possible. But perhaps if we could shine a light on our collective experiences, we could find new paths. One of my greatest pleasures since writing the book has been offering pedagogy workshops at universities, colleges and summer workshops. The space vibrates as people come together that have shared the same journey full of worries and love. There is a hunger to share, learn, and replenish. I call it a Dance Spa.
The book was made to glance at over a cup of coffee while preparing for class. There are chapters discussing the difficult choices we make concerning articulating a point of view, contextualizing our histories, sequencing activities, pacing, touching, and just plain making up movement. There are investigations at the end of each chapter that offer things to try, shifting slightly off center. At the end of each chapter are reflections that evolved out of my struggle to speak about the most essential aspects of dancing – presence, discipline, surrender, stillness, transitions, etc. I decided these things needed stories. Words lend themselves to narrative.
I encourage dancers to write. It is important. We have been learning deeply from our bodies and sharing with other bodies, and in many ways that is enough. But if we want to be missionaries for an embodied life, we need to translate; otherwise we will swim luxuriously in our own language. Another reason to speak and write. I value Margaret H’Doubler, Elizabeth Hayes, Mabel Elsworth Todd, Irmgard Bartenieff, Lulu Sweigard, Irene Dowd, Peggy Hackney, Thomas DeFrantz, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Eric Franklin, Ralph Lemon, Bill Evans, Andrea Olsen, Liz Lerman, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Deborah Hay – just a few of hundreds who have tried to write words about pedagogy and artistic journeys sought from the territory of the body.
Currently, I am working on embodying leadership in my role as Head of the Dance Department at the University of Illinois. It is difficult to bring the body to the position of the head. Now my daily struggles are to attend to the nuanced responsibilities of power and privilege, lend my heart to a community, and fiercely advocate for dance in an intellectually centered, non-body based academy. I keep trying to put this journey into words and imagine a book in the future titled Choreographing Leadership. But for now, I need more time walking in the woods.
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Related posts:
Writing Dancing: With Andrea Olsen
Artist Profile #119: Liz Lerman
Spotlight on MFA Programs: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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