questions for the masses

[dreams_of_wings]

 One of the things I'm hoping to over Winter Break from Suffolk is spend a bunch of time working on personal writing projects. One of the things I want to work on is a series of essays about dance from the dual point of view of dancer and critic. What kind of questions would YOU like to ask a dancer? Questions can be on just about anything--

Comments

[ayelle]

My votes

[dreams_of_wings]

I think I'm actually dumping Anne and moving disreputable history of Frankie Landau-Banks into that opening slot instead.

I originally chose Looking for Alibrandi because it does a pretty great job generally of laying out, in an interesting way, the sexual double standard. Another text that could get the students to think critically about teenagers and their assumptions about sexuality and gender is really all I'm looking for here. The week on straight sexuality is paired with a week where we read both Annie On My Mind and Huntress, and I want them to think about how we think and talk about sex differently when, for example, pregnancy isn't a potential issue.

[ayelle]

I love Disreputable History soooooooo hard. You must already know about this, since you know Deborah? http://yasubscription.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/frankielandaubanks/

> Another text that could get the students to think critically about teenagers and their assumptions about sexuality and gender is really all I'm looking for here

I'll let you know if I think of/come across anything.

[dancingwolfgrrl]

Ha, yes! I was just going to recommend Disreputable History as convincingly portraying the problems with hegemonic sexuality and with resisting it.

[dpolicar]

I'm not sure that this is a question, exactly, but I think the thing that would most interest me to understand about dance is how dancers experience the communicative aspect of dance.

By way of context... I was doing theatre for several years before I began to get a handle on theatrical staging as its own kind of language, began to understand what I was saying by staging a scene a particular way. It totally changed my perspective on what I was doing and why I was doing it.

I suspect something similar... or, well, maybe not similar, but analogous... is true of dance, but I have not the foggiest beginnings of a clue about what it might be like.

[drwex]

I commented elsewhere on dance. Here is my thought on the teaching: dump ALL the meh stuff. Even if you love the books, or even particularly if you love the books. The bigger the gap is between your love and the class response the more it's going to hurt and you don't need that in your teaching. You need to be teaching books that generate mutual love between you and the students, regardless of how you feel about the texts in the abstract. It should feel good to teach a text, not bring you down because you can't get across your love of a particular text. You will grow and change as a teacher and you may be able to return to a beloved text in the future and be a different person/different teacher with it.

I can't suggest specific replacement texts - that's outside my area of knowledge - but I have taught stuff that was "meh" with the class despite my love for it and I've resolved to try and avoid that whenever possible.

[dancingwolfgrrl]

A thing I would love to hear about regarding dance: characters. How connected do you feel to them? How do the dancer, the choreographer, and the character interact to develop a movement style?