Body, Mind, and Frustration
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Body, Mind, and Frustration: Navigating Dance in the Context of Academia Senior Honors Thesis By Kalila Kingsford Smith Thesis Advisors: Kelly Askew Erik Mueggler Submitted to the faculty of the School of Literature, Science, and the Arts in partial fulfillment of the honors requirements of the Department of Anthropology University of Michigan April 2012 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Acknowledgements 4 Prologue: Through the Lens of a Dancer 5 Introduction: The Body as a Canvas 8 Dance Students Dancing 8 Where Do I Fit? 12 My Process 18 Part 1: The Body and The Surrounding Space 21 The Technical Body: Where is Technique Located? 21 The Internal Details: Am I Improving? 28 The Integrated Technician 34 The Expressive Body: Authentically Transcending Technique 43 Conclusion 53 Part 2: Something to “Fall Back On”: Dance in the Context of Academia 55 Why Michigan? 55 The Dancing Academic 65 The Academic Dancer 73 The Faculty Experience 80 The Tension Between Art and Academia 87 Conclusion 95 Part 3: Frustration: The Dancer’s Companion 97 The Identifiable Frustrations 98 2 The Tyranny of Technique 103 Navigating Dualism: Body vs. Mind 111 Conclusion 124 Afterthoughts: Beyond Frustration 127 References 133 3 Acknowledgements I must recognize the people without whom this thesis would not be written. Kelly Askew, thank you for your guidance throughout this process. Your kindness and your critiques allowed me to organize and flourish within my disoriented thoughts. Erik Mueggler, thank you for always proving my point without ever intending to. Your words provoked me into passionate contemplation about how to represent my argument with strength and grace. All of my girls in thesis-12, you know this could not have been written without each and every one of you. I feel your whole-hearted support within every segment of my life. My entire U of M dance family, I don’t have enough words to express my gratitude of your constant support through the endless joys and frustrations I’ve shared with you all. And finally, to Mom and Dad, thanks for always being my foundation and my springboard. You listened to my passionate rants and helped me organize them into thoughts. I could never have done it without all your love and support; not to mention that I genetically inherited all of your stubbornness. I love you both immensely. 4 Prologue: Through The Lens of A Dancer I am a dancer. Every time someone asks me what I do, who I am, what I study, the first and foremost thing that I say is that I dance, I’m a dancer, I study dance. Most times people don’t really understand, and I then have to explain more about my identity as an individual, who I am, where I come from, what qualities I relate to, all the cliché answers that people give when applying for jobs. But my truth is that I dance. I cannot live without thinking creatively on my feet, and I cannot sleep without writing down the choreographic ideas that fervently bounce around my brain. I am a dancer; that is what I do and that is who I am. However, at this present moment, I am not just a dancer; I am a student of dance. This can mean many different things; for me, it means that I study movement as a creative art form within a university environment. As a student of dance at University of Michigan (U of M), I learn ballet and modern dance technique, anatomy and kinesiology, dance history, improvisation, composition, and I am obligated to audition and perform in as many dance concerts as possible. Throughout four years of being required to dance every day, I have developed a valuable and intriguing relationship with my body. I have learned to trust that my body has an intelligence that my mind sometimes cannot recognize. My dance education at U of M consists of harnessing this intelligence as a resource for a career that is filled with uncertainty. My body will be able to provide an anchor for my experience, but only if I care for it, acknowledging its need for movement and creativity. My life as a dance student, however, is not the only piece of my educational experience. Not only am I a dancer in the School of Music, Theater, and Dance (SoMTD), but I also study anthropology in the School of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA). I chose to come to University of Michigan, as many dance majors did, because it gave me the opportunity to study both dance and take advantage of Michigan’s excellent academics. I came to Michigan expecting 5 that I could easily complete two majors in four years. I knew that it was a smart thing to something alongside dance because it would give me “something to fall back on.” Thus, I chose Michigan, where I could get both a dance and an academic education. However, being a dual degree double major is not the easiest things to achieve in four years. I have two sets of requirements that I have to fulfill, and they rarely overlap in ways that make it easy. By splitting up my education into what seems mutually exclusive as academic and creative education, I’ve ended up frequently running into roadblocks that I’ve had to maneuver my way around with a considerable amount of frustration. When I began to think about why I was constantly getting frustrated with my education, I began to discover that certain things led to my frustrations. One was physical injury, which basically interrupts any kind of growth as a dancer. Another was that I feel like I was improving as a dancer at all. I was doing everything that was required of me, but I felt like I wasn’t improving or growing , or being satisfied with the work that I did. I began to blame my teachers fir not teaching the right things within a dance class, or doing the right kind of movement. I thought that they didn’t know what I, specifically, needed to hear in order to help me grow. One constant frustration was caused by when friends would find out that I was a dance major and then say, “You’re a dance major? Does that mean you just dance around all day? Do you even have finals? That must be so easy!” This has happened too frequently to count, and every time it does, my blood boils in anger because being a dance major is far from easy. The other frustration was that there simply was not enough time in the day to complete everything that needed to get done. I felt like my days became segmented between two parts: those hours when I would use just my brain, and the hours that I would use my body. The most satisfying days were those when I only danced simply because I didn’t have to feel so divided between models of behavior 6 and methods of learning. I could just dance and focus on how to intelligently think about my movements. However, these days were rare and I couldn’t always reach a place of satisfaction when I felt like my mind was in a different place than my body. Thus, as my education progressed, I continually came up against these frustrations that seemed to inhibit and change how I felt about my choice to be a dancer and a student of something else. I could have easily stopped and chosen a singular pathway, studying either dance or anthropology. But this was not in my nature, so I walked both roads simultaneously, continuously battling the roadblocks of frustration that rose up to meet me. I always assumed that I was personally frustrated because I felt obligated to study something besides dance. However, when I spoke with other dance majors, I began to realize that I was not alone in my battles against frustration. At every lunch break, I would run into clusters of dancers complaining about their injuries, their technique classes, their professors, and their academic classes. I realized that frustration was too common of an experience for dancers for it to simply be a personal experience. I became curious about why these dance students within this context of academia were constantly running into walls, forced into their frustrations. How did these dancers explain the cause of their frustrations? Were they ever able to overcome their frustrations? Does frustration happen so frequently that it becomes expected as a constant element of the dancer’s career? I began to wonder why these individuals were frustrated, who or what they blamed, and what it might reveal about the subculture of dance within the larger context of academia. This thesis is my exploration of these concepts and these frustrations from the perspective of other dancers in order to understand its implications for the education within the arts. 7 Introduction: The Body as a Canvas Dance Students Dancing The long elegant ballet teacher walks up to the barre1, demanding the students’ attention as her body prepares to demonstrate the first exercise. “Five, six, seven, and a eight.” She counts off the first musical measure towards the pianist, gracefully moving her arms into the first position of the exercise. She counts and moves, counts and moves, and occasionally mentions the name of the step and the number of times that step is repeated. As she finishes demonstrating the movement, she nods towards the pianist, and we begin to dance. Though she only said a few words, we all move in unison, integrating the motions of the legs, arms, and head in ways that seem to come naturally after years of watching dance and training our bodies.