Teaching Dancing with Ideokinetic Principles

Chapter 1. Beams of Light

Chapter 1 Beams of Light Because I took courses in physiology and anatomy at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, during the early forties, Dr. Sweigard said I could begin lessons with her after completing a single private course in bone anatomy with Dr. C. A. de Vere in New York City. I enrolled with him in 1957 and worked with him for six months. I started with Dr. Sweigard at the end of 1957 and continued with her for approximately a year and a half to two years. Attending the lessons was difficult, because at the time, she was not teaching at Juilliard full-time; therefore she did not often come to New York. Most of the time, I traveled to her home north of New York City in Tomkins Cove. I had lessons with her more or less once a week for the first six months, and after that, roughly twice a month (every other week) for a year. She visited my studio to watch me teach a dance class during the first month I was with her. That visit produced a lecture on the imagery I used in dance classes best described by saying that she went through the teaching imagery I used “like Sherman through Georgia.” She was scathingly critical of nearly everything I said in dance classes, justifying her criticisms of my verbal performance by saying that many of the images I used were either anatomically incorrect or that they focused on the aesthetics of the dance form I was teaching, not on the body itself. She also said that the imagery I used was “unexamined—that is, I hadn’t really thought it out, despite my anatomical training. She also said that the imagery I used in classes simply repeated what I heard in classes when I learned to dance. It was from her criticisms of anatomically incorrect imagery that I first got the idea of separating two categories of images pertaining to dance classes, such as “anatomical” and “aesthetic.” She was not prepared to tell me anything about what I shall hereafter call “dance imagery” (the aesthetic kind), because, she said, she knew nothing about dancing and was, frankly, not interested in it, except for working with dancers on their postural and mechanical problems. i-xiv_1-130_Will.indd 1 7/8/11 12:27 PM 2 chapter 1 Any anatomically based imagery I did use that alluded to bodily parts, such as “Keep your spine straight,” “Point your toes,” and the like, she totally destroyed by pointing out, for example, that what I meant by “Keep your spine straight” was “Keep your axis of gravity straight.” She also pointed out that the toes themselves did not “point.” The correct image pertains to the ankle joint in order to achieve plantar flexion of the foot. The ankle joint should be extended to the maximum possible, the toes themselves stretching out on a line and kept straight. There was to be no “clenching” of toes—a habit common among dancers and gymnasts that frequently requires extended retraining. She was convinced that one of the basic problems for most dancers consisted of the fact that they had no idea where movements really come from in the body. They think in terms of generalities such as “hip,” “thigh,” “shoulder ,” and “back.” They think of the outer contours of these bodily parts. Years later, after studying social anthropology, I discovered that dance teachers (in common with everyone) use a “social lexicon” of the body (see Appendix to this chapter, pages 18–20) that, for the teaching of movement, has substantial negative consequences. Especially beginning dancers tend to think of the external shapes of their bodily parts such as “hip” instead of thinking in terms of the bony structures and connections in the body, say, “thigh joint,” for instance, which locates the origin of most of the movements of the legs, or the “gleno-humeral joint,” which locates the origin of nearly all arm movements. Rote learning of the anatomical terminology doesn’t help. Learning anatomical terms should mean learning elements of functional anatomy that are important for the teaching of dancing. To Sweigard, the basic problem with most dance teachers was that their use of imagery in classes was “received.” They tend simply to repeat whatever they learned from whoever taught the classes they took, thus the usage of incorrect or distorted bodily imagery is transmitted from teacher to student, and has been for centuries. I do not...