Implementing and Reflecting on Action-Based Research
The Critical Dance Pedagogy Network Artist’s Lab in January 2024 brought together 15 dance artists, teachers and practitioners from across the UK, to share and enhance our professional experience, skills and practice. Through a series of creative, reflective and movement-based workshops, over the weekend we explored a range of prescient issues within dance teaching and pedagogy, including inclusivity, diversity, power and disability. Co-led by Angela Pickard and Stuart Waters, with guest workshops by Darren Carr, Bakani Pickup and Sophie Alder, we had the chance to engage in both theoretical and embodied approaches to critical dance pedagogy, such as using visual imagery, props, Skinner Release Technique and improvisation.
As a participant in the Lab, a conversation on the first day around ‘human givens’ and ‘human resources’ has stayed with me and continued to orientate my on-going teaching practice. As Stuart Waters explained, ‘human givens’ is the philosophy that we are born with 9 innate emotional needs (attention, security, autonomy, connection to others, community, privacy, achievement, purpose and status) and we all have natural ‘human resources’ that enable us to meet these needs (long-term memory, emotions, instincts, self-reflection, rational thought and imagination). Issues related to wellbeing, inequality and exclusion arise from the failure to have these needs met or fully realise our natural capacities.
Whilst the issue of unmet human needs resonates throughout a range of societal institutions and educational spaces, it is particularly pertinent in my freelance work as a community dance practitioner. Through my regular teaching in disability led settings – including care homes and SEND schools – on a daily basis I am confronted with the ‘social model of disability’ (Shakespeare, 2017) – socially constructed barriers inherent within the norms of dance teaching and techniques which systematically dis-able individuals with specific physical or cognitive impairments. Basic ballet positions, for instance, start from the assumption of a dancer with two legs and arms which they can move independently. In this context, a wheelchair user is ‘disabled’ and marked as ‘other’ through the perceived inability to achieve predetermined ballet aesthetics. On the flipside, a dancer with ‘invisible’ disabilities, such as dyspraxia, may be constructed as failing due to their difficulties with movement memory or co-ordination. Reflecting on my community practice, I am left asking: in what ways does disability nuance our understanding of human givens and human resources and how can an inclusive dance pedagogy be built from this?
An enriching aspect of Artist Lab was formulating our own Action Based Research goals. Starting first with reflecting on the challenges we face within our teaching practices, we then devised a research question that we would explore over a set period following the lab. I decided to focus my Action Based Research Goal on my regular teaching with a cohort of 6 students with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities from a special educational school in South London. Over a 10-week Spring Term, we devised an original choreography performed at the Step Around Town showcase at the Royal Academy of Dance. Inspired by a costume of silky blue butterfly wings, the performance explored the theme of spring, change and growth.
Cognisant of the potential for “inclusive” dance practice to become a didactic, infantilising and unequal exchange of knowledge (Ovenden, 2003; Whatley & Marsh 2017), a ‘human given’ I was keen to research and develop through this performance project was ‘autonomy’. One of the ways that dancers are dis-abled within educational spaces is not due to a lack human resources, such as memory, instincts or imagination, but that such resources may be expressed or communicated in ways that are not recognised within the norms of codified dance technique. As a non-disabled and neurotypical dance teacher, I was conscious that by exclusively teaching movements I had choreographed, I would be maintaining authority over legitimate dance knowledge. Teaching in this way risked disempowering students who would become dependent on imitating either myself or the learning support assistants. In Ovenden’s study (2003) of dance classes facilitated by the Royal Academy of Dance, they observed that a student with dyspraxia struggled with counts, musicality and movement memory, as she predominately relied on imitating the aesthetics of the teacher when conducting exercises at the ballet barre. Contrastingly, the same student was able to remember and stylistically perform movements from a ‘Sailor Hornpipe’ dance through associating the choreography with metaphorical imagery, music and role-play. In a similar fashion, I found that props, music, improvisation and partner work were instrumental for enabling my students to expand their movement vocabulary and exercise creative autonomy over choreographic material.
Before starting to set the choreography, we watched clips of butterflies growing from a cocoon and swooping over flowers, as well as spending time improvising movement whilst wearing the elasticated butterfly wing costumes. These costumes enabled the students - who had difficulties with balance, coordination, movement memory and muscle tone – to engage with a wider kinesphere of motion, drawing on their natural instincts and imagination. The more they extended their arms, the wider the wings splayed out. Absorbed in the sensation of the wings and the visual imagery of the butterfly, the use of props and video content allowed the students to generate movement that came authentically from their bodies, as they are, rather than in spite of them. Props shifted the emphasis from achieving normative aesthetics in technique, to exploring bodily sensations and potential.
Rather than relying on counts, using a musical track that was already familiar to the students – Rene Aubry’s piano score from a popular cartoon ‘The Stick Man’ – was useful for helping students remember the order of choreographic formations and material. One student in particular, would always hum to signify key cues in the dance – such as when the students changed level and formation – a vocalised expression of movement memory and understanding of choreographic intention. In this instance, music was fruitful for enabling students to engage in creative process of translation - the dancers responded to and translated information to ‘suit their own individual physicality’ (Whatley & Marsh, 2017: 6) and I would add, cognition, rather than mimicking pre-existing steps and set counts.
Whilst two learning support staff did perform on stage with the students, I was conscious of their potential to become ‘signifiers of dependency’ (Whatley & Marsh, 2017: 8) - inhibiting the students’ ability to develop their own movement style and understanding of choreography. Tasked with devising a short duet including three movements and a balance, I incorporated partner work, encouraging students to rely on one another for movement inspiration and execution. In making space for collaboration, I hoped to nurture an environment of co-authorship, challenging hierarchies of dependency between “abled-bodied” staff and “dis-abled” students. Whilst initially apprehensive about feasibility of the duet section, during the performance, it stood out as one of the more succinct and “rehearsed” aspects of the choreography. Through partner work, individualised means of performing choreography – such as counting silently in one’s head or relying on one’s own muscles to balance – was displaced in favour of collaborative relations built between the participants.
Reflecting on my teaching and choreography experience with this cohort of students, I recognise there are ways that I could’ve offered greater opportunities for creative and physical challenge. That said, the principles of ‘human givens’ and ‘human resources’, as introduced during the Critical Dance Pedagogy Artist Lab, orientated my attempt to foster inclusivity with my teaching practice. Drawing on the social model of disability (Shakespeare, 2017), I propose that when assessed against the codified norms of dance technique, individuals with cognitive and/or physical impairments can be misconstrued as “lacking” fundamental human resources, such as imagination or instincts, thereby justifying their disempowerment from knowledge production and creative expression within dance education. Using props, improvisation, music and partner work, I aimed to mobilise the imagination, memory and instincts of my students, nurturing their autonomy over choreographic material and creative processes. Developing autonomy is not only critical to building inclusive dance pedagogy – in order to dismantle unequal relations between the “able” dance teachers and “dis-abled” students – but also vital for opening new possibilities for knowledge construction and creativity. Paradoxically, autonomy within inclusive dance practice relies on rethinking learning and knowledge production as a collective, embodied experience, reliant on collaborative relations, rather than individualised fulfilment of criteria.
Written by Stella Rousham
Bibliography:
Ovenden, L. (2003) ‘Chapter 6: Dance for Children with Developmental Dyslexia’ in Burridge, S., & Nielsen, C.S. (Eds.). (2017). Dance, Access and Inclusion: Perspectives on Dance, Young People and Change (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315561516.
Shakespeare, T. (2017) ‘The Social Model of Disability’ in Davis, L. J. (ed.) The disability studies reader. New York: Routledge. DOI:10.4324/9781003082583-3.
Whatley, S. & Marsh, K. (2017) ‘Chapter 1: Making No Difference, Inclusive Dance Pedagogy’ in Burridge, S., & Nielsen, C.S. (Eds.). (2017). Dance, Access and Inclusion: Perspectives on Dance, Young People and Change (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315561516.