On the occasion of International Dance Day, the city is buzzing with a host of performances, with dancers performing old, new and themed works. Looking beyond skills manifested in a single evening of performance, one begins to see the years of learning that have shaped this moment – and concurrently, the years of teaching. This World Dance Day, artists who have been shaped by their experience of teaching reflect on the possibilities of pedagogy in dance.
A new world
Think dance teaching and our minds stray to the twice-a-week dance class, at the end of which one would have learned a new step or a new sequence. This is a continuous exercise, with skills imparted by the teacher and received by the student. The flow of knowledge is one-sided. An idealistic virtuosity is imposed on the body, which then works to live up to this image. A few years of this, and one is possibly a performer. This understanding of dance teaching as the process of coercing the body into pre-determined forms is changing. For a new generation of pedagogues, teaching is as much about learning and receiving as it is about giving.
A fresh understanding of pedagogy begins to have implications for personal artistic practice. In what they seek of themselves as performers, dancers ask questions that they then begin to resolve in the classroom. Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer Navtej Johar finds that what he is teaching is not just form or technique, but a method to generate affect. And this requires him to read dancers under their skins. He says, “Each day, I learn more about the body and of how best to improvise my instruction to effectively calibrate the body and inspire imagery. I also get to realise the potential of ‘shape’ – touched by attention, measure, breath and gaze – as it evolves into an affective image right in front of your eyes. What I am witnessing is a transparent trajectory of both cause and affect and this makes me a more convinced performer.”
This process of going beyond form and technique sees dancers critically rethink their approach to teaching. Bengaluru-based Odissi dancer Ashwini Raghupathy is often told that she is not a ‘traditional’ teacher. She finds that her job is to inspire and to keep an open mind. As a classical dance teacher, she shares her knowledge and helps students deal with self-conscious inhibitions. But she also believes in leading by example – in doing ‘crazy things’ and returning to dancing at the end of it, she reaffirms the discrete life choices students may choose to make.
The crucial audience connect
For Raghupathy, it’s crucial to acknowledge that students turn to dance for various reasons. She says, “Odissi has been a self-transformative practice for me. It opened me up towards the world and that didn’t happen only by colouring within the lines and making sure I am perfect. We get so caught up in perfection that we forget about connection. What you feel inside is more important than what you are doing outside. How are you touching the audience? I keep drawing the student’s attention to that,” she explains.
The notion of pedagogy is evolving not just for professional dancers, but also within the mainstream education space. Arts educators are considering what it means to have an egalitarian teacher-student relationship, where one doesn’t talk down to the other. This opens up the possibility of reshaping approaches to learning through highly-charged classroom situations. A few years ago, a four-year-old came up to me as I guided a group of riotous pre-schoolers through an exercise in tiptoeing across the dance floor. Earnestly, she said, “My toes are paining.” When I asked why, she responded with a naughty chuckle, “Because I am growing!” The social media timelines of arts educators are peppered with anecdotes in this vein, big revelations packed into banal conversations with toddlers and pre-schoolers. Teaching is increasingly about having thought-provoking conversations, where the learner asks questions and formulates the answers.
Change is constant
Language highlights this change – ‘teaching’ and ‘imparting’ are making way for ‘enabling’ and ‘facilitating’. The knowledge exists, and the teacher’s role is to help the student arrive at it. Arts-based educator and theatre practitioner Sananda Mukhopadhyaya articulates this shift when she says, “So much of the joy of teaching and working with children becomes accessible if you talk to children as people. I make life choices that feed into the conversations I am having in the classroom. I take public transport as it brings so many dialogues into the classroom. The way we live actively informs the way we teach and the kind of world we imagine for children. Often, you have the freedom to bring in these other observations and weigh them in equal measure to academic learning.”
Ultimately, for the artist, teaching becomes a process that draws them outside of themselves. They learn to perceive from the student’s point of view, simultaneously seeing and experiencing how the dance plays out on and in their bodies. For Johar, teaching has become a test of the form itself. He says, “Teaching for me is an exercise in facilitation and instruction involving intense identification with the bodies of the students. How do I inspire the body to shed the anxieties and self-diminishing notions of dance so as to flower into a form, and how then do I infect the imagination of this form with a word-image? Each time I teach, I am in a way testing the efficacy of the form, and thereby re-appreciating the fragility of the form.”
