Discussion of Teaching, Research, and Service

Early Professional Career

My career as a ballet dancer began after receiving my BFA from The Juilliard School, where I was awarded the John Erskine Prize for artistic and academic excellence and danced in works by Martha Graham, José Limón, Paul Taylor, and David Parsons. After graduation, I danced professionally with Oakland Ballet, Sacramento Ballet, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, and Trey McIntyre Project, receiving positive reviews from national publications including The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Idaho Statesmen, and Pointe Magazine (the most prominent ballet publication in circulation). I have had the honor of dancing original roles in world premieres by Alonzo King and Trey McIntyre, two of the most important contemporary ballet choreographers living today. At Oakland Ballet, I danced in reconstructions of early 20th Century masterworks by Eugene Loring, Agnes de Mille, and Bronislava Nijinska, and was chosen for original roles by contemporary choreographers such as Donald McKayle and Dwight Rhoden. At Sacramento Ballet, I danced principal roles in classical ballets, neo-classical ballets by , and in contemporary ballets by prominent choreographers such as Twyla Tharp and Sidra Bell. Renowned venues where I have performed include the Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Wolf Trap, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Yerba Buena, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Meany Theatre, Rialto Center, Paramount Theatre, the Egg, Marcus Center, Mahalia Jackson Theater; and major theatres in Germany, Italy, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Greece, and China. I began choreographing while I was still regularly performing, receiving commissions from Sacramento Ballet, New York Theatre Ballet, and Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre. My teaching career began with company classes at Oakland Ballet and continued with master classes at schools and universities across the nation with Trey McIntyre Project.

Teaching

The broad education I received in both ballet and modern dance at Juilliard and my professional experiences dancing both classical ballet and contemporary repertory have given me a wide lens. My knowledge of how to integrate these realms informs my teaching of ballet technique. In today’s professional dance world, the idioms of ballet and modern dance are no longer siloed; ballet dancers must be able to dance varied styles of ballet, modern, and contemporary dance. My own choreography asks dancers to traverse these territories fluidly and my class is an extension of that philosophy. I make it a priority to help students find their own voice within ballet—how to make the technique work for their physiques, how to speak the language of ballet poetically, not just literally, and how to dance ballet with the principles of breath, weight, and individuality found in modern techniques. Rather than working within one codified methodology, I design approaches that best serve the dancers in front of me by drawing from the Cecchetti, Balanchine, and Vaganova techniques in which I trained. I must negotiate the wide array of experiences and abilities of students, along with their career goals and current rehearsal repertory.

I believe in educating a dancer, not just training one. While classical ballet schooling has sometimes relied on “tough love,” I create a safe psychological environment where students can open up and let the artist within them come forth. I do this by employing positive reinforcement and encouraging risk-taking, exploration, and individual decision making. I give extensive individual and group corrections, guiding students’ improvement within each class. Many of these students will eventually teach dance, so, even in technique class, they learn pedagogical skills that will help them in their future careers. They work in pairs to figure out demanding technical moments, watch each other and give feedback, and explain their discoveries and difficulties to the rest of the class. I encourage students to develop meta-cognitive skills so that they begin to drive their own learning.

In addition to creating a psychologically safe environment, creating one that is physically safe is equally important. Classical ballet often forces the body to extremes that are dangerous for most physiques. I teach with an awareness of basic anatomical principles to help dancers find a healthy way to work. During my training and career, I struggled with a body that had limitations and injuries, so I am particularly sensitive to the fact that ballet must be individualized to fit every person’s body in a safe manner. My ballet class is designed to help all body types build the strength, flexibility, coordination, alignment, and physical awareness necessary for a professional dance career.

In addition to these fundamentals, I prepare students for the demands of contemporary ballet choreography with combinations that challenge them to work with extremes in speed and difficult shifts of weight and direction changes. Influenced by my experiences with Trey McIntyre and Alonzo King, my combinations tend to have a more contemporary feel than a traditional ballet class, asking dancers to find their individuality as well as develop sophisticated musicality. Music is important during my technique class as well as in my choreography. I encourage students to listen, not just hear. I often make comments about the music and suggest that students react to it. I ask them to explain why a combination felt different with one piece of music versus another. I encourage them to make choices about dynamics, quality, and musicality throughout class.

My teaching of courses outside of the studio follows a similar philosophy to that of my studio courses—students are asked to be individuals and reflect on their thoughts, opinions, and experiences. In Methods and Materials in Dance Education, the students receive a theoretical foundation in learning and motor-learning theories, and also a practical application of those theories by actively teaching a dance technique and creative dance class. They apply current research related to dance instruction that they acquire by reading academic journal articles. They learn how to design a class with a logical flow and progression, clearly demonstrate combinations, give effective cues and corrections, work successfully with both live and recorded music, and teach classes during an apprenticeship on campus and at a public school. Peer feedback is an essential component of the course, so they are constantly reinforcing the concepts they learn with each other. They also develop their own personal teaching philosophies, which they put into writing at the end of the course. Former students who are now teaching often email me to thank me for the skills they learned in my classes. Teaching this course has focused my attention on my own methods of instruction and was central to my being selected for the Transformation Through Teaching Award and University Undergraduate Teaching Award, as well as receiving an instructor rating of “excellent” by 100% of the students in 21 of the classes I have taught since my start at FSU in 2013.

My role as an educator extends into my responsibility as BFA Program Director, undergraduate academic advisor, and mentor to undergraduate and graduate students. As an advisor, I meet with a sub-section of undergraduates one-on-one each semester to discuss their progress and help them select courses. In addition to academic advising, I served as thesis committee chair for 5 graduate students and committee member for 8, and Honors in the Major mentor for 2 undergraduates. Mentoring involves meetings with students; giving feedback on proposals and writing; attending run-throughs, rehearsals, and performances of students’ creative work; and serving on proposal and thesis defense committees. Students also seek me out for mentorship related to their professional development and their future careers. Mentoring is one of the areas where my teaching, research, and service intersect the most. I am constantly accessing my experiences as a choreographer and dancer, as well as my personal process for proposal writing, to help guide students. Another area of intersection is my choreography and staging of dances for FSU students. The skills I teach them in class and through my mentorship are reinforced through my creative process. I expose them to the current professional dance world when I teach them repertory I am performing or staging for professional companies and when I bring them to national festivals to perform my choreography.

My teaching has not been limited to academia. I have taught numerous master classes across the country and teach every summer at Perry-Mansfield (the oldest continuously operating performing arts school and camp in the nation). I have taught dancers who have performed with prestigious companies: Theatre, Alvin Ailey, Hubbard Street, LINES Ballet, , Ballet, , and Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, and others who are teaching at universities, such as Western Kentucky University, Missouri State University, Florida A&M University, Texas A&M University, University of Tampa, and Coppin State University. At the heart of my teaching is the idea that dancers are not mindless bodies, but thinking, creative artists. I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to help dancers grow into artist scholars.

Research

My research focuses primarily in four areas that overlap and intertwine: community engagement, film, choreography, and performance. These areas all serve my overarching agenda to cultivate and advance the intersection of ballet and modern dance—contemporary ballet. My education in both classical ballet and modern dance; my teaching philosophy, which embraces a progressive approach to ballet utilizing concepts from modern dance; and my role as a performer in repertory choreographed by major figures of contemporary ballet all serve this agenda. My creative work continues the trajectory of these great choreographers, in dialogue with the current evolution of ballet. To bring ballet, which began as rarefied, elitist, European court dancing, into the present moment and toward the future, I am continually investigating its aesthetics and values, making choices about what to hold onto and what to discard. What are ballet’s universal truths? What are the benefits of its codified physical system? How does ballet remain relevant in our current society?

Community engagement is an important part of the answer to the last question. My interest in this area was sparked by the community dance work I did as a performer with Trey McIntyre Project. This contemporary ballet company was known for its innovative methods for interacting with communities and building dance audiences, so much so, that the company was selected for a cultural ambassador program overseas, DanceMotion USA, sponsored by the State Department. In my paper, “Bonding and Bridging Through Place: An Investigation of Trey McIntyre Project’s Use of Alternative Spaces and Common Place in its Engagement with Communities” presented at the World Dance Alliance Conference in Hawaii, I investigated McIntyre’s attempts to bring dance to audiences, instead of expecting them to come to the theatre. I explored his use of “common place” in his choreography and how that created bonding within, and bridging between, communities.

My involvement in community work continued while I was a graduate student at the University of Washington. I designed and taught an upper level academic course for undergraduates entitled “Dance and Community,” which was a historical and cross-cultural examination of the relationship between communities and dance. The students investigated the ways that dance is used to build a sense of community among individuals, and the ways that communities employ dance as part of their rituals and spiritual pursuits, for social and political change, to empower marginalized groups, and bridge disparate groups. I also assisted choreographer Jürg Koch on a community-based production of Rite of Spring; choreographed my own community dance work, Dialogues; researched best practices for student engagement for university arts presenters; and wrote a paper, “Performance Matters in Community Dance,” published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Emerging Dance Scholars, which I presented at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities. In this paper, I argued that despite the fact that most of the literature on community dance emphasizes the process over the product, the cumulative performance (the product) is an important component in building community and empowering participants in many community dance works.

Community engagement has continued to be a focus of my research, as well as my teaching and service. I am one of the founding advisors for the Community Arts Initiative (CAI), an organization designed to facilitate community-based projects for School of Dance graduate and undergraduate students, which was selected as FSU’s Organization of the Year in 2016. In 2014, I created a site- specific intergenerational community work, The Memory Project, with Assistant Professor of dance Rodger Belman and Assistant Professor of art Jeff Beekman, who created a sculpture used in the dance. The project began with conversations about memory with community members as well as highly respected figures in dance ranging in age from 15 to 80. The collected memories became the inspiration for a series of dance vignettes performed outdoors by community members, faculty, and students in a wooded garden as part of a benefit for the Florida Wildflower Foundation. The next year, Belman and I organized a similar project, The Garden Project, in collaboration with local artist Linda Hall and CAI. These endeavors became the inspiration for CAI student projects that we mentored in subsequent years. I presented two papers in 2017 related to my work in community engagement while at FSU: “Grassroots in Academia?” at the World Dance Alliance Global Summit in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, and “Community Arts Initiative: A Model for Community Engagement in Education” in San Antonio, TX at the National Dance Education Organization.

In line with my community-based work and research presentations, my film work investigates how place shapes the creative process and how improvisation in response to the environment can evolve into structured and calculated choreography through the editing process. I see film not only as the next frontier for my own creative research, but also for contemporary ballet in general. Confining dance only to proscenium stages and studios makes the cultivation of wider audiences challenging. Film provides a means to take dance to a vast array of locations, to increase exposure, and keep it relevant. My first film, Convergence, funded by my First Year Assistant Professor Award, was shot in the redwoods of California and explores the fragile balance and precarious quality of our relationship with nature. I served as director, editor, co-cinematographer, co-choreographer, and dancer for the film, which screened at 9 highly regarded international film festivals. In 2015, I was commissioned to create a short dance film, Fledgling, by Perry-Mansfield, which screened at 3 international film festivals as well as the Dance on Film Series at the Bud Werner Memorial Library in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Fledgling was Dance Teacher Magazine’s December 2016 Video of the Month. Like Convergence, Fledgling was inspired by a location: the gorgeous mountain setting of Perry- Mansfield. I continue to explore place with my most recent short film, InterState, an investigation of identity, migration, and displacement filmed across the U.S. at national parks and iconic monuments from Seattle to Florida. I was awarded a grant from FSU’s Small Grant Program to fund the film’s score. InterState was a finalist in Toronto’s Alternative Film Festival and screened at 12 competitive international film festivals, including the St. Petersburg International Film Festival in Russia (Jury Award), ScreenDance Festival Sweden, Braga International Video Dance Festival in Portugal, Light Moves Festival of Screendance in Ireland, and Los Angeles Dance Shorts. InterState will also be featured in a 14-page article in the Biennial Edition of the Berlin-based magazine WomenCinemakers. Like my films, my choreography for the proscenium stage also has a connection to place and space. Almost all of my dances grapple with the concept of displacement, of feeling out of place, or of longing for another space than the one currently inhabited. Issues surrounding gender and who is allowed to occupy what spaces come into play in my choreography as well. With my two most recent dances, Give and Take (performed in NYC and mentored by renowned choreographer Doug Varone) and Facile Manipulations (commissioned by professional company Bowen McCauley Dance), I moved away from these narrative concepts, and instead embraced a formalist approach to space.

Drawing from the legacy of collaboration between classical ballet choreographers and composers, music is integral to my choreography. I most often work with contemporary music, pushing ballet into the present. My works Dialogues and Spin and films Convergence, Fledgling, and InterState were collaborations with contemporary composers. I worked with live contemporary music for my pieces Primal Identity, Interchange, and All at Once. The Path Supreme (performed at Dumbo Dance Festival in Brooklyn, NY), Gaining Ground (performed by professional company ARC Dance in Seattle), and Out of Sight (performed at the Boston Contemporary Dance Festival) have music by Kronos Quartet and Brooklyn Rider. Both of these ensembles are known for playing edgy contemporary compositions. Contemporary music played on classical instruments parallels my use of contemporary movement created for classically trained bodies.

Although I have retired from a full-time performing career, I performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in 2014 in Far Behind, a duet created for me and my husband by Lucy Bowen McCauley for her company Bowen McCauley Dance (BMD) with live music by the country rock band Jason and the Scorchers. BMD was recognized by Washingtonian magazine as “one of the area’s best dance troupes” and by The Washington Post as “Metro DC’s premier contemporary dance company.” I performed a solo with BMD in 2017 at two major theatres: the Signature Theatre and Landsburg Theatre in D.C. I choreographed Petit Four and Facile Manipulations for BMD with performances at the Signature Theatre in 2017 and the Kennedy Center in 2018. I also performed with FSU professor Hannah Schwadron numerous times locally. Her improvisational methods influence my creative work and my teaching with an approach not frequently taken in classical ballet. Her project Field Studies 2016 in New York City provided an opportunity for me to dance a solo I choreographed, Take a Seat, at Chez Bushwick and Gibney Dance. Take a Seat was the counterpart to the solo Interchange that I choreographed for Tallahassee Ballet and then performed myself at FSU’s Evening of Dance with accompaniment by School of Music cello professor Greg Sauer. Performing keeps the physicality that I need in my teaching, choreography, and filmmaking fresh and relevant.

My last area of research that combines my skills as a teacher, choreographer, and performer is my work staging dances and serving as rehearsal director for existing works by established choreographers. Staging involves teaching the choreography to all of the performers and coaching them in their artistry, musicality, and technical accuracy. In 2016, I staged Trey McIntyre’s masterpiece Wild Sweet Love for and will be staging it again for Grand Rapids Ballet in the fall of 2018. This was a work in which I danced the original leading role in performances across the U.S. and internationally. I have served as rehearsal director for works by respected choreographers Alex Ketley, Amy Seiwert, Nancy Smith Fichter, and George Balanchine.

I have been recognized for my creative activity by national and international publications and festivals and my reputation has led to commissions from professional companies and schools. I will continue to advance my standing as a premier artist in the contemporary ballet realm through future projects, including choreographing a duet for myself and Sona Kharatian, leading dancer with , which will be the content for a new short dance film in early fall of 2018. I will also choreograph a new work for Bowen McCauley Dance for their 2018–19 season.

Service

My reputation as a dance artist has led to invitations to serve in respected national and international dance organizations. I was invited as one of three adjudicators for the New England and Northeast Conferences of the American College Dance Association, evaluating choreographic works by students and faculty from colleges and universities, giving feedback and selecting works for a final showcase. I have also adjudicated for the Florida Dance Education Organization, evaluating and selecting dancers for awards. I have been co-chair of the World Dance Alliance’s Digital Dance Concert (an international dance film festival) for the past three years, soliciting submissions, serving as a reviewer, selecting an order for the program, as well as performing other administrative duties. I also reviewed World Dance Alliance performance submissions. My expertise as a performer, choreographer, and filmmaker serve me when curating and appraising the dancing, choreography, and films of others. It is one of the most beneficial forms of service I do, as it enhances my own creative work and teaching by further training my eye and sharpening my skills in giving feedback.

In addition to my role as BFA Program Director, I have served on a number of departmental committees, including the Audition Committee, Assessment Committee, and Curriculum Committee. As BFA Program Director, I oversee the undergraduate program and the Combined Degree Program (along with the Graduate Program Director), edit the Bulletin and Handbook, uphold policies; recruit students, and advise students. The Audition Committee involves teaching audition classes, watching applicants take class and perform their solos, evaluating applicants, and interviewing applicants. This process occurs three times a year with more than 200 applicants. As an Assessment Committee member, I helped assess student progress, meeting with about 100 students per year. As Curriculum Committee Chair, I evaluate the curriculum, make recommendations for changes, and edit and submit all new syllabi through the university system. Lastly, I have served on three search committees for two faculty and one staff position. Other service while at FSU includes: organizing the meetings of ballet and studio faculty, teaching warm-up classes for performances, teaching at the Suzanne Farrell Workshop every year, adjudicating school concerts, and advising CAI. At the College and University levels, I served on the College Student Awards Committee and Distance Learning Awards Selection Committee.

Prior to my time at FSU, I was involved in a variety of service-related activities. I served as the liaison between the Dance Program at the University of Washington and the university presenting organization, the UW World Series, giving support to activities that involved the engagement of performers with UW dance students. I also volunteered as researcher for the UW World Series, gathering data from university presenting organizations across the country to develop a list of best practices for engagement between campus communities and performers. The UW World Series has successfully implemented many of these practices. While dancing professionally, I participated in significant service including teaching and performing in schools, at-risk facilities, senior centers, nursing homes, hospitals, YMCAs, and an immigrant integration facility in Brussels, Belgium. The service I performed as a graduate student and professional dancer has significantly influenced my current teaching, research, and service, as I continue to connect dance to communities and help mentor others to do the same.

*** Please visit www.ilanagoldman.org for photos, videos, and reviews of my creative work.