Dance Techniques 2010

220 Teaching: Principles and Methodology
Gill Clarke, Franz Anton Cramer, Gisela Müller
Teaching: Principles
and Methodology
Conceptual Basis
The primary goal of the teaching is to facilitate an active
process of mindful and embodied learning so as to support
the individual dancer’s enhanced awareness, discernment,
and discrimination within their own consciously directed
and spontaneous movement, and thereby to open up the
possibilities available to them. Another aim is to help the
student refine their perception and hone their attention to
the extent that they can become their own proprioceptive
feedback mechanism 19 —become their own teacher, as it
were—so that their learning can become self–generating.
The core of the work, then, is immersion in the momentof
perceptual experience while moving. The mindful
body moving in space, alone or with others, is the laboratory
within which observations arise and ideas and images
are played out and tested, inside which the knowledge of
movement rather than about movement is prioritized.
Yet around this core are layers of reflective and discursive
activity intended to facilitate an experiential flow between
internal and external attention, implicit and explicit
knowledge, intuitive and rational states, perceptual and
conceptual thought.
In more specific terms, the emphasis has shifted from
one in which the work was seen as contributing to the
training of a dancer to become one embracing a concern
to contribute to an artistic education. In this sense technique
is not conceived of as a defined movement content
or vocabulary—it is not a thing to be transmitted, replicated,
and performed with accomplishment as an end in
itself, nor does it offer a fixed system to achieve this end.
Rather, it is a process that continually evolves in relation
to Gill Clarke’s own research and practice. It adapts in
conversation with any particular group of individuals in a
specific context, guided by students’ curiosity, their reflections
upon their experience and Clarke’s own observations
of what might further facilitate learning.
The tenets that demand a flexible and nonlinear learning
experience, however, exist in an enlivening tension
with a belief in the benefit to physical learning of generating,
sustaining, and directing a focused group energy in
the studio. This state of concerted attention can create a
powerful learning environment in and of itself.
This lively tension between freedom and structure extends
to content and delivery. The work is founded on
clear anatomical principles and offers a structured and developmental
approach utilizing clear propositions, tasks,
forms, images. Gill Clarke encourages this information to
be experienced, explored, tasted and tested as a possibility,
as one choice, rather than passively received as ‘the right
way’ and replicated as a movement form.
The work requires teaching units of at least two or
two-and-a-half hours, with a clear preference for three or
more. In general, the more in-depth the experience, and
the more opportunity for integration of reflection and
practice, the better the dancers will understand and be
able to apply insights and experiences to their own physical
being / movement.
One might distinguish between a learning phase in the
form of a course of study, (whether that be an introduction
to this way of working, or a re-visiting to deepen embodied
understanding), and the use of the work as a daily
tuning in an ongoing professional practice.
During a learning phase, an intensive and immersive
framework is required that provides time for ideas and
images to be processed through deep sensory work and
for embodied understanding to accumulate in layers from
day to day. There needs to be an un-pressured atmosphere
to encourage the body–mind to be open to notice and
embrace unfamiliar sensations, which can lead to the allowing
of new choices of pathway, direction, and patterning.
On top of this, time is needed for the partner–work,
individual exploration, and application to dancing, both
through more familiar forms as well as through new and
more complex movement puzzles, and, again, time for reflection.
Whereas some technical approaches might benefit from
less intensive delivery several times a week over a long period
of months, this work benefits, in a learning phase,
from a daily practice of around three hours over a shorter
period of several weeks, ideally followed by shorter opportunities
for further application and practice so the embodied
knowledge does not fade and can be further reinforced.
Once sensed and embodied, however, and if one is
in a relatively ‘tuned’ mode, applying the work through
regular living and dancing practice, the information can
then be accessed relatively quickly and easily. Periodic
19 This would include additionally interoception
as well as exteroception; proprioception
designating the feedback of muscles and
joints as to movement and position, interoception
of organs, exteroception of outside
world.
20 See the DVD, for example.