From Blog Director Jill Randall:
I am excited to launch another project for 2015 - MFA Dance in Review. This online publication will fill a unique niche, providing a place for dance criticism and writing about MFA Dance performances. To find out more and to submit writing, please click here.
---------------------------
Today I am excited to be putting together a few ideas that have been swimming in my mind – around podcasts, interviews, and college dance departments. Please join me - brainstorming ideas that can be used in college dance courses.
SoundCloud is a website that is used to listen to music, share music, and also share/listen to interviews. My alma mater – the University of Utah – recently posted a 10 minute interview with Abby Fiat.
I believe there is great potential to use sites like SoundCloud to capture conversations and musings with dance artists. I myself have been listening to an interview I did as well with Abby Fiat a few months ago. (I am transcribing it for an upcoming piece on my blog Life as a Modern Dancer.) I studied with Abby 18 years ago, but listening to her voice now – recorded – quickly transports me back to studying with her and having a connection. I have been quite surprised in the power of the recorded voice.
Here is what I am proposing. As a component of a course during the final year of undergraduate studies, could each student interview a professor who has been pivotal in his/her training? What questions can we ask? How can we capture ideas and inspiration that we can listen to in years to come?
College students can easily use Voice Memo on a smart phone or tablet to record the interview. The interview can then be uploaded and “archived” on a site like SoundCloud.
One of my other areas of interest is about college departments/alumni relations. Does a college department have an obligation to its graduates, especially during those first few years leaving the nest? Could these archived interviews be a “continuation” of the program? I venture to say, since so many concepts and corrections in dance are lifelong recurring ideas, recording these interviews can support lifelong learning for a dancer.
Please become a part of this conversation and leave a comment below.
-----------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This week on Facebook, I was excited to see a post from my alma mater (the University of Utah), saying that all students now have free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud. What a gift for dancers.
Techwise, I think it would be valuable for college dance majors to leave school knowing how to create and design his/her own website, a postcard for a performance, a flyer promoting a class, and a program for a performance. These skills will come in handy again and again.
----------
By Ashley Ferro-Murray, doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
It has been one full week since I flew from New York, NY to meet my dancers in person in Berkeley, California. As I discussed in my first post, everything from our auditions to rehearsals was conducted remotely until last week.
Our first live moments were quite awkward. We had awaited the meeting for so long and felt such intimacy online, but when I approached the dancers for the first time in person we weren’t sure what to do. There were some forced smiles and big hugs, but we weren’t quite sure how to move together in the same physical space. The awkwardness fell away quite quickly, but I’ve allowed for that initial moment to linger. The in person awkwardness was so representative of our practice, which had worked quite well online. We had planned for the online process to fail, but it never really did. It was only fitting that the long awaited live meeting – that which would undoubtedly make everything even better – would also let down some of our high expectations.
What I found when I arrived in Berkeley last week was a dance that I structured, but one that my performers had choreographed. They had taken all that we worked on over the computer and filled it with their movement personalities. Since I wasn’t in Berkeley to dictate intricate details that were invisible to the online eye, each dancer had taken the liberty to fill in the gaps. This led to delicate distinctions between each dancers’ movements and created a personal texture in the dance. I could have never choreographed this work if I had been here, physically, and I think that the dancers learned a great deal about their own individual movement styles that they may not have discovered otherwise.
MOOCing? premieres this Thursday, April 17 at the UC Berkeley Zellerbach Playhouse at 8:00 pm. For tickets, visit: http://tdps.berkeley.edu/events/berkeley-dance-project-2014-intimate-distance/
There will also be a pre-show conversation on Thursday, April 17 in Zellerbach Hall 170 at 5:30 pm.
-----------------
By Ashley Ferro-Murray, doctoral candidate in performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley
MOOCing? is a choreographic investigation of online instruction, an urgent matter within institutions of higher education. I was interested in making this dance because I was worried that dance departments were being left out of conversations about the future of higher education and online instruction. Meanwhile, dance is an art form predicated on liveness, presence, and corporeality - all topics that are central to debates over the efficacy of online learning. In an attempt to explore how dance might be central to understanding online learning, I decided to make what I think of as a meta-composition about online instruction in dance. The title of MOOCing? references increasingly popular "massive open online courses," or MOOCs, but the piece itself focuses more generally on the practice of distance-based collaborations. The twenty-minute dance is the product of Internet interactions between myself working in New York and six student choreographer/dancers in Berkeley, California. MOOCing? will be performed in a traditional live theater setting as a part of the Berkeley Dance Project at the University of California, Berkeley in April.
The rehearsal process for MOOCing? is a hybrid online and “on-land” process. The entire cast meets online one rehearsal weekly – each dancer on his or her own computer and in independent locations from which we converse and move together in a Google hangout. The other two weekly rehearsals happen with all of the dancers together in one space, and with myself choreographing from afar. For these on-land rehearsals we project my image on a large LCD screen in the dance studio and I watch and direct the dancers from the view of a webcam. In planning the piece I hoped that access to both online and an on-land learning environments would make an interesting juxtaposition in the dance and for the “meta” nature of questioning distance learning. Still, while the dancers interact with one another in the same physical space twice weekly, I am never physically present. I have only met one of the six dancers in person.
As an ensemble cast, MOOCing? performers consider what it means to learn movement from someone who is not physically present - who is at a distance. The cast asks, is it possible to bring the specificity of our physical place to each other through the means of the Internet? What does it mean to make traditionally physical dance from afar and online? Distinct from other types of technology-based distance collaboration such as teleimmersion and motion capture experiments, my cast and I focus specifically on pedagogical methods for making dances in the context of higher education. We use relatively accessible technologies as opposed to high-tech systems and devices.
We are currently in our sixth week of rehearsals and I can now confidently say that we have made a dance together – it’s working! We have a dance that consists of a lot of tableau work, a few phrases of movement based on the idea of connecting distant body parts (for example the left shoulder to the back of the right knee), and work with Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies to translate movements from one space to another. We have done a lot of work to translate movement phrases from one plane to another, one point to another, or one realm to another. We are also mapping our digital connections with string to physicalize our virtual experiences on the stage, and working with a set that consists of different platforms to invoke the process of moving together but from different locations.
We have found that focusing on a few modes of communicating over the Internet has actually deepened our physical practice. For one, talking has become more central to this choreographic process. In order to get to know one another, to be able to hear and understand each other clearly, we have had to have many more spoken conversations than I usually facilitate in rehearsals. We also use the webcam to get up close and personal with specific movements. I am able to zoom in on a specific part of my body with the camera to show each student details that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to if watching me from the other side of the studio. By focusing the webcam on my feet, or my hand, or a hip, I can use the gaze of the camera to guide my students’ focus.
This new mode of working has forced us to slow down the choreographic process and to reflect more on each action – verbally and corporeally, which we feel has deepened our engagement within the relatively rushed process of making a dance within the eight-week semester time slot. I’m also thrilled that we have been able to develop a real cast cohesion and trust among one another, even though we remain at a distance. Stay tuned for some blog-post updates about our process, how the piece is progressing, and specific obstacles that I face as a choreographer working with dancers across the country. You can also read some words by my students on our blog, moocing.wordpress.com.
----------------------
Today I would like to highlight the idea of a blog, or website, as a "living textbook" in a college course. That is the main purpose of my other blog, Life as a Modern Dancer.
We all know well that our selection of books on dance is small, and that the rate of new ones getting published is a slow one. Also, through my own experience, I see that it takes years to create a book, edit the writing, and work with a publisher.
Blogs and websites can offer valuable information and reading material for college courses and offer information that is current and up-to-date. Editing and updating is made super easy on the web. Online sources also can be free or very reasonably priced.
My Life as a Modern Dancer Blog has been in existence for one academic year so far, and several colleges around the United States are using it within a course. Each week I highlight a different artist, who answers a series of questions. The goal is to highlight dancers in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s and the many career paths we take within modern dance. Each week I also pose some discussion questions related to the post. To date, 43 artists have volunteered their time to write heartfelt, honest, and informative posts.
Back to the bigger topic of "living textbooks," iTunes U is still an incredible and untapped resource for the dance community (whether you make a course public or simply use the format to run a course at your school).
We continue to see interesting intersections of higher ed and the internet. None of these ideas - blogs, websites, or iTunes U courses - are meant to replace in person college courses. The internet sources are simply meant to be an integral component for the course and as a source of reading material.
For dancers as well as educators, you will love the interactive site that Jacob's Pillow recently launched. Jacob's Pillow is the longest running international dance festival in the United States, and they have hundreds of videos from their archives now online. What a gift.
Yesterday I watched a Ted Shawn video from the 1930s. The videos date back from the 30s and run the whole way through to the present. You can search the site by artist names, genre, or era.
This will become a great and valuable resource to use within college courses.
Click here to explore.
Since then, this initiative has helped to broadcast concerts to a large community outside Iowa, nationally and internationally. Dance audiences have been able to enjoy some of the most important performances in the department such as: Dance Gala, Dancers In Company, Faculty/Graduate Concerts and Thesis Concerts. In addition, it has made possible for the students in the department to virtually interact in the classroom with professionals from locations such as, New York City, Mazatlan and Puebla, Mexico.
Submitted by Armando S. Duarte