Left image provided by Ivy Williams
ID: Left image is of two black femmes in black hoodies and masks jumping in a circle during an outdoor rehearsal. Right image is a still from the final phrase video on the home page. Six dancers are in various stages of a leap within a studio that has a bright green wall.
My dance teaching centers on empathy and our ability to remain grounded in our everyday experiences as a muse for creativity. Fundamentally, I am motivated by dance helping us communicate interpersonally while remaining sensitive to cultural and physical boundaries. As this is a body-based practice, dance provides us time to reflect on people in the room and the heritages we bring in a way that can teach us to be more self-aware and present. In being present with our bodies, we can then start to move towards having more grace and awareness of the people we call community or near to us.
As a facilitator of creative spaces, I prioritize reflection as a way to slow the fast speeds of communication and labor in our current society. My teaching praxis reflects this speed, as I encourage students in my dance classes to use somatic practices based on body-mind centering and experiential anatomy to assess their emotional and psychological wellbeing. Using class as a way to slow down from the world, allows students to more deeply connect their work/academic lives to their creative lives. By blending technique principles with a somatics approach, I hope to tell students that there is rigor in presenting as they are.
The majority of my dance teaching experience has been split between young children and adults new to modern dance. This has allowed my educational objects to be centered around creating positive dancing environments that hold space for “mistakes” by rigorous play and imagination. Similarly, dance is used to share cultural values and knowledge with young children and adults. A priority in class is to provide avenues to connect the forms of dance taught to its cultural history. When in conjunction with more traditional forms of archiving culture like speech or writing, I think dance allows us to process cultural knowledge through our most intimate medium.
When students are willing to share and be open during class vocally as well as physically is when my instruction feels the most beneficial. Classroom culture being manifested verbally and physically becomes a way for students to reaffirm their personal goals and boundaries. It also provides space for practicing how to safely explore our limitations under the care of our peers and instructor.
My personal research explores the limits of identity as a signifier in performance and real life. I think being sensitive to my own position in the world helps me also recognize how others may have strong boundaries about which styles they feel are accessible to them. Starting from a somatic perspective into a more stylized technique is the main method I use to center the student as an agent of their education.