My opinion: Dance education is different from academic education because knowledge must not only be learned, but also embodied. We bring our neuro-muscular system into the studio, which operates largely on autopilot with only limited ability to take direction from our thinking mind. The goal of dance education is to teach dancers (thinking mind) how they can work with this system (neuro-muscular) to train quality dance movement over time. It’s not so different from training a horse or a dog, except the trainer (you) and the person being trained (your body) are one and the same.
This is the understanding I take with me when I enter the studio, which I describe as a healthy form of objectification of my body. There are things it can do today and things it cannot. Musicians can choose their instrument, but I cannot choose my body. My job as a dancer is to get the most out of my body today, and to move forward the project of training it in specific ways for beautiful / efficient movement. Our bodies are smart, but knowing how to work with them intelligently, as a partnership, is key. I do not measure my person success based on what my body can do today, but instead on how I am working with it effectively for the best outcome. If I can identify and fix one problem, then that’s a win! And as a student, I learned that many small improvements, accumulated over time, lead to a gratifying transformation into the dancer we always wanted to be.
Because dance is embodied, the teacher cannot simply tell students what to do: every body is different, and we experience our bodies internally in ways that are hard to verbalize. Teachers do tell us what to do, but it often doesn’t make sense… until one day it does, and we look back and wonder why we never applied the teacher’s advice before. Aha! That is one of the most exciting aspects of dance training, the process of continued self discovery. Agan and again. Because it takes many moments of self discovery to build a beautiful dancer.
The teacher’s job is to guide and lead dancers in the process of self discovery, connecting internal discovery with the external demans of the technique. The two must work together. And thus, the teacher and student form a partnership in discovering, learning to work with and training the student’s body. From this point of view, it is obvious that an unhealthy student-teacher relationship undermines the process, and also why a safe environment is critical. Ultimately we learn movement by trying many different things and optimizing toward what works. What is actually going on inside is far more sophisticated than what any teacher can explain verbally, or even with touch. There is no “failure” in the dance studio: only trying different things, observing the results and changing how we dance based on it.
Different teachers have different styles, which may or may not work well with a given student. I prefer working in a professional environment where criticism is direct and efficient and praise is reserved for down time outside the studio. As someone who has long since separated my sense of self from my body, that is an efficient way to work and maximize progress. But students — children — may need a gentler approach, with more frequent affirmation. In any case, we must distinguish between teachers who are “hard” because they are direct and efficient in their corrections, vs. teachers who are abusive. One is OK, depending on the situation. Whereas the other is never OK and leads to dimished human beings.
Dance education is ultimately about building us up, making us all more human and empathetic. Not about dehumanizing or tearing people down.