dance on paper

As any technique class taker knows, a superb, experienced dancer does not necessarily make a good pedagogue. This has been my major frustration taking drop-in courses here in Paris, at the Centre National de la Danse. The CND offers technique classes to professionals at the state-subsidized rate of five euros (fantastic!) and draws in dancers and instructors from all over France and Europe. Unfortunately, with my New York bias, most of these instructors teach a movement style that is slightly out of date or just plain uninteresting to me.

I am realizing now that I was spoiled in New York. Here in Europe, you have incredible, modern centers for dance (the CND alone is an unimaginable resource), but not very many exist in the same city. In New York you have Movement Research and Dance New Amsterdam, for example, who host a constant slew of people actually involved with current events or who have very valuable movement styles to teach. I feel the classes I take here are very 1990s-heavy (re: attitude-y, modern jazz-like dance) and just now starting to tap the vein of neutral-body-rendering techniques such as the Alexander Technique.

P.A.R.T.S., the most notable modern dance school for young European dancers in Brussels, is very much rooted in postmodern instruction, frequently drawing on Trisha Brown cohorts and similarly influenced artists. However, I feel that its founder, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, is also stuck in the 90s; her latest creations have little immediacy and relevance to today.

This is all to say, despite its fantastic dance resource and constant bill of performers, Paris is not a place for dancers who want to develop their modern technique. Perhaps this is because Europe still sticks to a conservatory mentality. As a male dancer who began at age 19, I’ve had anything but a conservatory-style formation. I’ve scraped my dance training together from university technique courses, summer dance festivals and the hodge-podge drop-in classes in downtown Manhattan. After much disappointment and frustration, I have come to appreciate those dance classes in which you actually grow.

I therefore miss workshops by the lovely, pedagogically gifted Gwen Welliver, whose articulate, structured teaching style was first-rate. By the end of a five-day workshop, you feel like you’ve made significant, tangible progress in the quality and clarity of your movement. Instead of being force-fed a lengthy frenetic phrase in the last twenty minutes of each class, you work with the same material each day, enabling you to really settle into your body.

Today in class with Carole Gomes, we had a great, integrated warm-up, where I felt grounded, loose and open, only to end the class with a jerky, obviously scraped-together phrase that betrayed all the qualities that we just spent an hour and a half developing. My consequent crummy mood I know did not come from that infectious dance class bug, poor self esteem; it came from the disappointment of a potentially enlightening class gone astray.