My First Article in Print

Just a quick note to say that I've had an article accepted for publication in the March issue of Dancer Magazine. With a circulation of 26,000 readers, Dancer is the largest national publication addressing the needs of Dance educators and Dance studio owners. I've been blogging on their site for a while now, and was recently asked to contribute something for their print publication.

My topic of choice is "Intro to modern dance: developing a well-rounded curriculum for beginner adult classes". (Except the title isn't quite that wordy.) It's the Modern Dance issue, so I was happy to pull something together on a short deadline. I don't want to give too much away but a lot of my research for this article was done while at the Dance Exchange teaching the Intro to Modern class.

This will be my first piece published in print, but definitely not the last! I'm very excited to move into writing for print media (although I'll never give up blogging). While writing for magazines has much stricter guidelines and necessitates a more formal voice, it pays (not a huge amount but better than nothing) and it's good for my portfolio. And hopefully it will lead to more paying work in the future :) The hardest thing to adjust to is not writing in the first person.

Anyways, I will make sure to post the link if/when it goes online!

Intro to Modern Dance: Loie Fuller

One of my responsibilities during my apprenticeship is to co-teach some of the community classes here at the Dance Exchange. On Tuesdays I'm helping Elizabeth and Shula teach Intro to Modern, a class for adults that looks at modern dance through the methods of technique, composition and history. Each week we take our insipration from a different person in the history of modern dance - the class gets an assigned chaper of reading, and our in-class work is structured around that icon's technique, concepts and interests.



So far we have covered Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. Next week we will be doing Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. This Tuesday, our technical exploration of Loie Fuller was based in the use of momentum and weight. We started with a gentle warmup, then progressed to a couple of simple combinations. The first was a swingy arm combination, feeling the weght of our limbs and their ability to move the body through space. The second was a combination focusing on the lower body, exlopring shifting weight from one foot to the other and finding the undercurve that facilitate a grounded, weighted feeling of being connected through the body to the floor.


We explored these concepts further going across the floor, with low runs leading into a suspension, the leg pulling you back into two slow steps. We found that the most diffuicult part of this exercise was controlling our momentum going into the suspension, and finding the opposition in the back leg to pull us backwards instead of allowing the forward momentum to overpower it. We also played with contrasting "up" and "down" movement qualities, juxtaposing the same long, low runs with quick, light prances.

For the composition exercise, we took all of that movement information (in vocabulary or quality) and added another layer - being inspired by light and fabric. We split everyone into two groups and gave each group a long piece of white fabric to work with. The afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the windows, making a perfect performance space for our creations. Here is what the groups came up with. Simply breathtaking work! I was wishing that I could join in, it looked like a lot of fun. Very inspiring...




Group 1





Group 2