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Published in 1959, The Art of Making Dances by Doris Humphrey tracks the evolution of choreography and offers suggestions to dancers about the decisions they will eventually have to make as future choreographers, mentors, and teachers. This isn't a book review. I have been reading books by creative types who have been willing to try and describe the whys and hows of their creative processes.
Thus far, at least of one of two common trends appear within this slate of reading:
a. educators aren't doing what creators say works; in other words, education traditionally immerses itself (and its students) in the status quo--the mistakes and unhelpful practices which creative, thinking people sprint away from in the opposite direction.
b. the status quo (rules, rubrics, traditions) suck the life and the possibility out of students.
In this case, while writing about the creative processes in dance, Humphrey may as well have been about the teaching of writing in 2019. You don't even have to revise any of Humphrey's words. The metaphor of dance choreography for writing instruction rings clear enough:
"One of the greatest hindrances to deviation from the status quo was the cold facts that the tradition in schools and ballet companies was crown supported and any rebel was out of a job (17)."
"...there are certain personalities who are at their best only in a given framework, and who feel most comfortable in a setting where they are told what to do (29)."
"...feeling, sensitivity, and imagination...have been pretty well beaten out of the average youth...(48)."
"...years of explicit instruction in the use of muscles, coordination, balance, centering, correct 'line'; he has learned lots and lots of 'steps' or sequences, and has been thoroughly disciplined in the right way to do these things by hundreds of corrections (48)."
"To me, the really dull and unforgivable dance is the performance by the mediocre technician who has nothing to say... (110)."
All of these activities [opera, film, dance scores]...are frowned upon as inferior by his teachers, who are bound to uphold the tradition, and who know nothing about them either (149)."
It strikes me, the more I read, that education is more concerned with being a performance rather than a studio. A performance is for outsiders to passively view from arm's length--in order to judge, to support and/or fund (or not).
A studio is an active space. In a studio, mistakes, experiments, growth, failure all take their place alongside of imagination, freedom, and the possibility.
We we too often grapple with in education is not possibility but status quo.
Among the anecdotes resonating with me from Jeff Tweedy's Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) is when Jerry Wexler praises (then very young) drummer Roger Hawkins: "You're a great drummer." Tweedy writes that when Hawkins shares the story there is a very brief and poignant punchline: "So I became one."
It makes me wonder about the words we say to adolescents...and the seeds of future truths we plant.
Few successful people (at least those I have read) praise their formalized schooling for their success. Most often, success is linked to the perverse joy of the failure encountered while doing the work. I read again and again and again that the concept of the long genius (we are born one way) is a myth. The repetition of the work is what matters most--the work we want to do for us, not the work someones else prescribes.
I am so often thinking, while I am reading, about how we have been trained and encouraged to teach may be more limitation than liberation.
I love Tweedy's simple yet powerful "I try to make something new, something that wasn't there when I woke up, every day 168)." He didn't invent that concept, but he learned to do it. He learned the habits that work for him so that he might write and create and contribute--to engage--every day.
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