What We Can Learn From Other Perspectives in Dance
A Local Dancer on Having Empathy For Industry Professionals and Students
By Laura Eberle, DWC Blog Contributor
Photo by John Roque
I got a new job this year as a dance teacher for a small middle school team. I had never experienced this side of dance before, I had always been a student, so it really gave me a new perspective on dance classes and how teachers (re)act. I think that we’re often so focused on our own situations that we never notice how our actions may look to others. But if we take a step back, there are a lot of things we as dancers can learn from perspectives other than our own.
What are some things that only a teacher would see?
As a teacher, I learned to meet students where they were at and help them comfortably reach the next level of technique or a skill. I didn’t expect them to be able to immediately perform perfectly or get something correct every time, like I do with my own dancing. Teachers don’t expect perfection out of their students, after all they are students, and more than that, humans. Teaching students helped me overcome some of my perfectionism when it comes to dancing.
Similarly, teachers don’t usually focus on how far you are, but rather, on how far you’ve come. Yes, it is impressive to be able to do a triple pirouette, or a perfect split leap, but if a student starts the year without even a single pirouette, it is unlikely that they would be able to reach a triple by the end of the year. Students start at different levels and progress at different speeds; it is unreasonable to expect everyone to reach the same milestones at the same time. At the very core, teachers just want to see you grow, so the fact that you’ve made progress is often the most important part.
Teachers/choreographers have a vision when creating a dance – this includes the music, the costumes, the choreography, and even the tiny details of style. No matter how much you try to explain it, some dancers won’t be able to understand the ‘vision’, which can become really frustrating. Sometimes the ‘vision’ isn’t visible until every piece is complete and put together, so we should try to hold our judgements until we can see the whole vision. Even then, everyone has a different brain and a different imagination, so we can’t expect every dancer to understand every vision, and as dancers we have to accept that not every dance or ‘vision’ we’re in will click with us.
I really did get frustrated when students were gone so often, especially when they wouldn’t explain why they were gone. As a teacher who only sees students once a week, it becomes difficult to teach properly/well when a student is gone often. That’s not to say that there aren’t good reasons to miss class, there certainly are, but the more often a student gives excuses for missing class, the less valid those reasons start to feel. And to the teacher who receives little to no excuses or warning for a student being gone, it may seem like the student is disinterested in their own classes or not committed to the craft.
Something a little more concrete I understood from being a teacher is the significance of going back to the basics. Sometimes as you become a more advanced dancer you unintentionally sacrifice basic technique in order to get those fancy moves down. But when you’re teaching new dancers, you have to start with the basics, and keep practicing them, you can’t just go over them once and expect them to stick. I found that reviewing the ‘simple’ elements that we often forget to maintain helped me to reapply those elements to my dancing.
Now what might a fellow student dancer see that we may not?
Being in front of a mirror so often can make it really easy to compare ourselves to others, especially in a community where that has been encouraged for so long. It’s easy to think that other dancers judge us the same way we judge ourselves. But our fellow dancers and friends don’t see what we see in the mirror. They see us just as we are. I know I certainly don’t judge my friends based on how high their développé is, or how many turns they can do. So why should we base our own self-worth as dancers on those things?
Photo by John Roque
Instead of comparing ourselves to our peers, we can learn how to have better attitudes from our friends. Sometimes if I can’t seem to find the motivation to dance I can look to my hard-working, passionate friends and get the motivation to take my training seriously from them. On the other hand, if you can’t have fun in your dancing, friends are a great way to take dance a little less seriously. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t take dance seriously, but just that you should be able to enjoy dancing.
What are some things that we can learn from a parent or an admin perspective?
Now these ones I don’t have any first person experience with, and I won’t pretend to know what it’s like. However, I have talked with my mom – the head administrator at a dance school – a lot, so I thought I might pass on some of the things she has talked about.
Admin and teachers work very hard to create a safe, supportive environment for students to come in and dance because they care about the students. They get to see the many different personalities in dance and watch them grow – both as people and as dancers – and truly want them to succeed. There are so many different jobs that go into making dancers look good in a performance, it really does take an amazing, caring team to make us look so good on stage. We as dancers can’t forget this when we are performing or when we see the people who help us look good, we have to remember that they are also people who put in a lot of time and effort and deserve our respect.
The business side of dance is something that I think most dancers never really see or pay attention to, but it really does take a lot of work to keep a dance school/company running, to order and organize costumes, to book venues, to create programs, and to coordinate between all the different people involved. These people work behind the scenes and don’t often receive much recognition outside of mentions at the back of programs, but without them our dance world would be very different. We should be grateful when we can show up and just dance without having to worry about any of that stuff.
Something my mom has talked about is that for many dancers dance isn’t just a way to spend time–it serves as much more. Along with creating a safe environment for people to express themselves, dance also teaches many life skills that will be very helpful throughout all of life. There are a myriad of skills that can be taken from dance: you learn diligence from the commitment and the hard work that it takes, you learn how to work in a team when collaborating with other dancers and choreographers, and you learn how to listen to a teacher and how to take constructive criticism, among many other skills. These skills can be helpful in nearly every field that exists, as well as daily life.
My mom also pointed out that having dance helped me, and probably many others, cope with the pandemic and the lockdown. If you were lucky enough to have dance online (as different as it was), you could keep some semblance of your regular routine while everyone was stuck at home, and continue to have a creative outlet during one of the craziest times of our lives. Having this form of expression can be uber important for sharing feelings that we may not want to talk about, as it allows us to tell our story without having to put it into words and open up to someone about our insecurities.
Photo by Melinda Eberle
These are just some of the things that I’ve learned from exploring other perspectives of dance, but there are certainly hundreds of additional things we can learn from others in our environment, or even those in different environments. I have only experienced a small slice of the pie that is the dance world; there are so many other perspectives to be considered. I highly encourage everyone to take a step back and try looking at something from someone else’s point of view when you have the opportunity.
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