TEACHING HISTORY and PRESENT

BELINDA MCGUIRE has taught and choreographed as a guest artist for Harvard, École de Danse Contemporaine de Montréal, The Juilliard School, The Limón Institute, Marymount Manhattan College, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, State University of New York at Purchase, Canada’s National Ballet School, New Jersey Dance Theater Ensemble, Brooklyn Ballet, and Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre, among others. Specializing in Limón technique, but also adept at teaching classes in improvisation, ballet and creative dance (ie. for really young ones!), she has extensive experience teaching a range of ages (3 years and up) and experience (via open community class, public school outreach programs, pre-professional conservatory programs, professional open class). The most satisfying scenario is when teaching, performance and creation can happen in tandem. From Belinda’s point of view, as teacher, performer, creator, these are just three approaches to the same goal, and by leveraging and coordinating their implementation, more is yielded and illuminated, and the impression is longer-lasting.

 

“She is a gracious and witty dance educator. She possesses a profound awareness of the body/mindconnection and offers wonderful imagery to enrich and deepen students’ embodiments. Her class proved to have a lasting effect as some students still talk about her imagistic references.”

Jennifer L. Conley, Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance, Doctoral Candidate, Temple University Martha Graham Regisseur

 

“She is positive, hugely inspired and possesses extraordinary energy beyond the professional standard. She has incredible musicality, and a powerfully strong and expressive body. She is unique by every standard and driven with her desire to dance and create dance. Beyond that she has served as a role model for all of our dancers in our pre-professional training programs with her ability indance, her voracious appetite to move and generosity in sharing her knowledge with others.”

Nancy Turano, Artistic Director, New Jersey Dance Theatre Ensemble & Faculty, Alvin Ailey School & Ailey Fordham BFA Program

REMOTE TEACHING

 
 
 

How to offer a dance class remotely, in isolation, with a not-so-conducive-of-movement-type environment?  This was my first swing at developing an innovative approach to the novel circumstances.  Applying this to the classes I give as part of a modern dance course I teach at Marymount Manhattan College, I instructed the dancers to work on their own with my video of class 1.0 in lieu of our Tuesday session (which of course we used to have together on campus, now relocated to their individual living rooms, porches, garages etc. across the country), then we would meet via Zoom for our Thursday class, when we would endeavor to "do" the class together.  This asynchronous approach was intended to:

 

Tuesday

  • foster the dancers' powers of autonomy

  • allow for each dancer to work at their own speed (people learn movement at different rates, and this disparity is amplified by the nature of technology and the 2-dimensional, non-encompassing medium)

  • give the dancers insight into how each of them learn.  Learning from a video is usually the lest thrilling way, but it is still a useful tool for the future, and a necessary one for now.

 

Thursday

  • afford some kind of satisfaction from some sense of dancing/being with other people - the effect is motivating and buffering in ways that make the course more effective, and everything more fun and less intimidating

  • allow me to watch the dancers - the idea is that by reducing my need to demonstrate and coordinate the class in real-time, I could see more. Because they would be coming to class with some pre-existing experience with the material, the dancers would rely less on the sight of me and the sound of my voice, both of which can seriously interfere with the sound quality (of the music) and the focus quality (of the dancers) in a live Zoom class scenario.

  • foster a new kind of relationship with their computer/tablet/phone as a vector of class, by encouraging them to notice and then choose not to keep their eyes locked on it, to allow it to see them without them looking back. While being counter-intuitive (for most of us, for now), because this is how we know to relate to/with our devices, it is analogous to our live performer-selves to a live audience, or our live dancer-selves to a mirror.  It's good to be able to re-direct our attention.

 

Over the course of three weeks we would progress through class 1.0, class 1.1 and class 1.2, each offering additional material, complexities, but also opportunity to re-encounter previously introduced material and principles.

 

There are more big-picture goals and additional thoughts - I discuss some of these at the end of class 1.0 (about 1:10:00 into the video). One concern, for example, was naturally alleviated by me, the teacher, being in a position of having probably the smallest space and hardest floors of all my students, so by tasking myself to come up with a fruitful and compelling way to practice, I was less likely to be amplifying resource availability of some students over others, and less likely to direct them to move in unsafe ways.

 

That was April 2020. I am posting this more broadly now, as a way to continue and broaden this beta-test phase, and to contribute what I've discovered (effective and non) to the dance community.  Seems we might be continuing to innovate our pedagogy and dance practices through the fall, but regardless, I find this stuff interesting.  So please feel free to give this a try, pass along, reach out to me if you have questions or comments.  I'm at belindamcguire@belindamcguire.org.

I will likely develop another series or two over the summer - in theory each one will be better - but I'm happy to take requests or commissions to design a class for a specific population and context (ie. level of experience and age of students).