Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality

V. PEDAGOGY

i have always tried to be thoughtful about my teaching, which spans a wide range of theoretical and practical classes both in and out of the academy. As reflected in most of the writings collected here, i have spent much of my life intentionally drawing connections between our physical experiences and (meta)physical responses, recognizing that how we move through the world affects how we think about it, and vice versa. Sometimes ideas can help us stretch our notions of what is important in dancing or choreography; at other times our bodies can learn a new physical practice much faster than our minds can comprehend it. in the last few years, i have delighted in teaching courses outside the dance program (such as my first-year seminar Bridging the Body/Mind Divide) that ask liberalarts students to bring their embodied knowledge into the process of learning intellectual debate and critical writing skills. These classes combine philosophy, feminist and queer theory with somatic exercises intended to engage those ideas directly in the body. This section traces different modes of engaging bodies and minds across a variety of teaching situations, from contact improvisation to a cross-cultural dance history course to Girls in Motion—the after-school program that i run in the local middle school. generally, i think about teaching in terms that reflect my physical engagement with my students. For instance, one of the realizations i had early on in my teaching career is that resistance is support. indeed, it is much easier to feel my own weight and position if someone pushes their weight into me. This physical truth comes from my training in contact improvisation and guides many of my pedagogical strategies, although i hasten to add that the resistance of which i speak is a firm but open resistance, not a rigid, inflexible reactionary resistance. i like the feeling of mutual engagement when one body leans into another. in the classroom, this engagement allows the students to feel their own reaction and access their own point of view as the teacher “leans” on their body or thinking. The physical work clarifies very quickly what V Pedagogy 248 it means to commit one’s self to a point of view; to feel one’s weight is an intriguing way to think about agency and voice in academic discourse. The first essay, “Dancing Across Difference,” was written early in my academic career for a special issue of Women and Performance focused on pedagogy. here i extrapolate the lessons about positionality and proximity that i learned from teaching contact improvisation in order to think about the negotiation of bodies and power in other classroom settings as well. on the one hand, contact improvisation fits uneasily into an institutional framework. learning how to deal with the risk, uncertainty, and complexities of teaching thirty young people how improvise in close contact—how to roll together and jump on each other—stretches me every time i teach the class. on the other hand, being able to engage students in the learning of this dance form for two-hour classes, three times a week for fourteen weeks, means that we move beyond the initial euphoria of tactile connection into a more layered experience of this deeply interpersonal dancing. Then too, i have found that teaching within the context of a liberalarts college setting has enriched my sense of the political, sociological, environmental, and feminist potential of contact improvisation immeasurably, as students bring the knowledge of their other courses to lean on this form. The second essay, “Channeling the other: An Embodied Approach to Teaching across Cultures,” was originally given as a talk for an international Federation of Theater researchers (FIRT) conference in Jaipur, india, and was subsequently published in Research in Dance Education. in this, i confront the complex power dynamic involved with teaching dance history across cultures. An animating question for me in this investigation was: how can i engage my students’ bodies in learning about a dance culture with which i may have no physical history and certainly little cultural background ? While i want to be attentive to the differences between cultural appropriation and cross-cultural inspiration, i find myself urging teachers to take some risks and encourage students to use their bodies to kinesthetically imagine other forms and contexts for dance. Using my experience with teaching a section of my cross-cultural dance history course on classical indian dance, i propose several strategies for consciously including students’ bodily learning even when...