Pilots in Musicality

Now that I'm spending time researching musicality, I'm also doing a lot of thinking about how I'm already teaching it. This week I tried some new tactics with my students, some of which seemed to help and some of which flopped. I've noticed with all of my young students thus far (granted, a small sample) that they seem to struggle with simple rhythm and counts the most. Technique they learn, class etiquette they learn, but they really struggle with just something as simple as counting only four tendus and not five or six in each direction. If they were really young, 4 or 5, I could well understand that, but they're 7-10, and I would have thought that counting would be the easy part! So I tried a few clapping exercises and such, and I think if I pursue that vein of exercise, it may help.

On another note, I'm rereading/reskimming through Researching Dance and loving it, especially taking the time to read chapters I hadn't read before. I'd forgotten what a useful book it is. I found chapter 4 especially helpful on the differences between positivist and postpositivist research helpful, since the terms themselves weren't really ones I was familiar with. Hearing the terms elaborated was quite nice and I understood better how they fit into my research framework, which was already quite postpositivist--I just didn't know it was called that! I've struggled with getting all the -ologies and -ists straight in my head, so I'm very much appreciating reading about them in a way that makes sense to me and helps me get them straight.

Questions for the comments--1) have you found that your young students struggle with musicality, and if so, what ages does it start to mesh for them? Have you done any exercises for it, and if so, what? 2) How would you frame your own research thoughts in terms of -ologies and -ists?

Musicality Mind Map (and other thoughts)

So research is progressing into the concept of musicality, and I'm still finding very little in the field of dance. Yesterday I read a couple of articles by music teachers; there's more information available for musicians, perhaps unsurprisingly. My concept map thus far looks like this, in text form:

Musicality--what is it? Is it innate, taught, or both?
     HOW can it be taught (including in different fields and styles)? In different age groups?
         Do teachers actively strive to teach it, and if so, how?
             What and how do dancers think about it and practice it?
What are its boundaries, in terms of spillover into feminist pedagogy re: dancers learning to make choices and the general nebulous concept of artistry?

More thoughts will come, but that's how things are developing thus far. My mind is clicking with various ideas of teaching tools and project ideas, so I take that as a very good sign. Comment with thoughts on musicality, especially if you have anything to add to the mind map, and/or talk about how your own project is going!

The First Research Gap

Tonight, as my brain was shutting down from exhaustion and I was just about to put my reading down, I found my first research gap, and it was a totally different direction than what I was expecting. I've been reading Paula Salosaari's dissertation Multiple Embodiment in Classical Ballet, and she discusses the three choreographic options in ballet. You've got narrative content backed by form (form roughly equaling technique), form without content (think variations, that sort of thing, although I'd say this is arguably the third category already), and the third option, form as content. She goes on to say the following:

If only narrative intention and content is recognised, the ballet classroom work from an expressive point of view becomes problematic. The technical execution of the vocabulary can often be clearly defined, while the expression in it is elusive. Teaching needs concepts and words for the qualities inherent in the vocabulary. If the classroom work is emphasising learning the vocabulary as a basic technique on which the later artistic intention (probably dramatic) is added, the dancer may not become aware of the potential expressiveness in the vocabulary itself. The lack of qualitative intentionality in the classroom practice leads to the attitude that formal dance material is to be performed ‘impeccably’, and that the range of choices is narrow (Salosaari 2001: 31).

When I read that, I realized that's exactly what's happened with many of my students. I'm working diligently with one of them to help them understand how to play with musical nuances, and I can tell I'm only getting through to them sporadically. Then I realized just how often I've heard teachers call for musicality, and how little I've heard about how to actually accomplish that (and even more so, how to teach it). A couple quick searches on Summon reveal an astonishing lack of results for "ballet musicality" or "dance musicality." There's some magazine articles and a handful of academic pieces on musicality in other disciplines, but only a single one for ballet (about Cuban dancers' musicality). There surely must be more to it, and I'll keep researching it, but it does so far appear to be a gap.

What I find rather amusing is this is a topic quite dear to my heart. There's a definite fitting-ness, so to speak, to my studying this. I've always been the musical one, the dancer who plays with the music and finds working with the music to be one of the most interesting parts of dancing. That being said, how I hear music has always been slightly different than most of my teachers' ideas, and I have only found one person who hears it the same way I do--one professor, in university. Now, as a teacher, I'm firmly convinced that a mainstay of what we call artistry has to do with this idea of form as content, how a dancer uses the simplicity of technique in conjunction with music (or other sounds/silence), but it's a very difficult concept to teach and to communicate its important to students who, in my experience thus far, seem mainly focused on form as form.

I've already got some ideas percolating about how to move forward with this, but it will have to wait until I've gotten some sleep! In the meantime, I would love to hear any thoughts from others on anything surrounding this topic, even if tangentially related.

Skype Followup

Yesterday we had our monthly skype meeting, and I found it very useful and refreshing. It was great to chat with classmates on topics that we're all dealing with despite our huge differences in age and work situations and home cultures.

One of the things that I brought up was how to find the sweet spot in research topics between something that has been researched enough that you can find sources on it and something that is still new enough that you as researcher are contributing something to the field and aren't just reinventing the wheel. I've been struggling with that as I thought there wasn't much research yet on this topic (feminist pedagogy in the ballet classroom/teaching dancers to think and contribute) but there very much is. That's a good thing, of course! But I don't want to reinvent the wheel in my research. On the other hand, I know that whatever research is being done has not yet translated into an awful lot of ballet classrooms, and that is still an area which needs a lot of work. Too many classrooms are still like some of the ones I was in growing up--authoritarian, harsh, and with little regard for the dancer's physical and mental health. I thankfully had mostly good teachers, but the few I had that weren't have left lasting scars. I don't want any dancer to grow up with scars like that, and so there is still work to be done.

Anyways, Brandon mentioned that the farther into research one gets, the more gaps will appear, even if seems like everything has already been researched to death. It hasn't, of course, and the further in one gets, the more holes will crop up in the literature. I'm hoping that as I go farther into my research, those gaps will appear.

How have you found those gaps in your own reading?

The Reading Continues!

Well, we're another week into the module and progress is happening. I've finished Bell's book, which is something I can tell I'll return to during the process, and I'm about a third of the way through with Decolonizing Methodologies. It's a fascinating read, not only for the intended content, but also for the history. I know very little about the history of indigenous peoples of New Zealand--all of my schooling focused on indigenous peoples of North America--so it's interesting, though obviously troubling, to compare the process of colonization and decolonization between the two places. A lot to process through and a lot to sit with, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the book continues.

On another note, I'm in a different place job-wise than I was last week. I've had some unexpected but very welcome opportunities fall into my lap, and it looks like I'll have more available directions to go in with my research than I expected, which is very exciting! That means I can really start looking into the research as such this weekend now that I can relax a bit on the job front.

And on yet another note, I've been reminded in the last week or two just how much teaching is a process of learning. I mean duh, of course it is, but I've had several moments in the last few weeks of trying to help students with this or that and figuring out to explain it as they were learning how to do it. I'm sure at a certain point, teachers see certain issues over and over again, an FAQ of sorts. I'm beginning to amass those things too (hyperextension, so much hyperextension with young students). But on the other hand, since every student is different, it's fun to think that there will never be an end to interesting challenges in this career.

What has happened in class lately that has surprised you? Perhaps something a student has done, or a new way of explaining things?