Teaching Philosophy

In my teaching, I aim to foster an environment of collective awareness. I believe that building trust in ourselves comes through holding space for what is yet unknown, and that compassion—for ourselves and for one another—is necessary in the process of discovery. This surfaces cogently in my teaching, where I cultivate a reflective environment in which I encourage students to be self-aware, investigative and rigorous.

My teaching is the bedrock of my choreography and artistic process. In my work, I ask myself to observe how I move toward what is unknown; how I shape lost time; how I sit with myself in uncertainty; and how I apply and direct what I feel in order to make it legible to others. Moving through this terrain, I prioritize resilience and imagination, possibility and joy. I am interested in how we come together in a class and surpass presumed notions of what that space should be to, instead, build awareness of how we can be, for—and with—each other. How do we come to arrive in dance spaces? What are the selves that show up when we dance? What do we think we need to know in order to dance? How can we open things up? I am committed to the interactions and strategies that take place in a dance class, the room itself working as a crucible for the kind of risk-taking and experimentation that can only happen in the company of collective effort and support.

My teaching is rooted in the belief that we are the central axis of our learning and development; that moving and witnessing are forms of deep listening; that what we are doing together in a classroom is “tuning” our environment. When we dance together, what is our rhythm? What is our song? What kind of tension do we need to arrive at for the desired outcome of that day? The tension is the learning—the thresholds of awareness and the endless possibilities within the questions we ask. It’s something we can only find together.

This semester, I asked my students at Rutgers University what felt “urgent” for them to learn. Across the board, they said “how to move into and out of the floor.” I sensed that they were thinking of “into and out of” as a task: moving from vertical to horizontal, from standing work to “stuff” on the floor. I wondered what the bridge could be to connect the two planes in their bodies and imaginations. In my classes now, I begin with what is closest in. “Your feet are already on the floor,” I say. We take time to imagine the shape of a pyramid at the bottom of our feet, to feel the temperature of the floor through our calluses and to sense the versatility in our bones. From there, we work up to the pyramid-shape of the pelvic floor, then into the diaphragm as “ring leader” for the activation of the pelvic floor. In this way, I aim to shift my students’ thinking from a binary view of the body’s pathways (up vs. down) to a holistic understanding of the complexity in the body’s range, finding synchronicity, possibility, and diversity in movement.

I believe the future of dance training resides in holding compassion both for what we know and what we don’t know. How do we attune ourselves to detail, sensitivity, and nuance?

What can we learn from our bodies and from each other? The question remains, “Why dance?”; the possibilities and futures we can imagine through asking it are endless.