Dance Training is Life Training: Our Responsibilities as Dance Teachers

"People who write about spring training not being necessary have never tried to throw a baseball"- Sandy Koufax

I left off writing this blog until I had some time to process my thoughts. And still they’re not so cohesive, but I felt the need to get this off my chest. Recently a friend posted a status update on Facebook about some workshops that she had taken recently and how much she enjoyed them. The comments below the status piqued my interest for a number of reasons.

One commenter spent the entire thread of comments trying to devalue the necessity of workshops. The commenter in question, who shall remain anonymous, is a teacher of bellydance. However, they do not attend workshops – they’re too expensive, perfecting technique is not deemed as important and mixing styles without consideration of the origin is totally fine. And all this is ok because the troupe are booked all of next summer. Oh and travelling for workshops – no chance. But it’s ok, because the audience loves them, and the audience doesn’t care if it’s technically correct. They just love to dance.

Ok – so don’t for one minute get me wrong here. I know that not every dancer wants to become a professional. I have some students that come to class every week, that most likely don’t practice at home, that are not interested in performing or teaching or doing anything other than coming to class once a week, being social, keeping fit (I imagine that’s a great draw for a Tribal Fusion class) and having fun. And I do not think there is anything wrong with that at all. There’s a place for everyone in bellydance, that’s why we love it so much.

However, the responsibility is completely flipped when we become teachers. It took me a very, very long time to finally become a teacher. I was nagged by various dancers since 2010 – why aren’t you teaching yet? You should be teaching! When are you gonna start teaching? Come on Alexis, it’s 2012, you want to quit dance? Don’t be ridiculous, you should be teaching a class! Get yourself some students, you’ll soon see you don’t really want to quit, you just need a new motivation. But still, it took two years of nagging before I set up my weekly class. Because I wasn’t ready mentally for that. I made the decision to start teaching because I finally felt ready to be doing it. That I’d accumulated enough knowledge through training to be able to teach safely and effectively, and that I’d developed my approach enough to have something to contribute.

There's me at a Sharon Kihara workshop in 2008.
Photo: Polstar Photography

If I were to calculate how much money I had spent on learning to bellydance, it would cost more than my Bachelors, Masters and PhD degrees cost me all totalled together – and that doesn’t even include the cost of travel, accommodation, food… And I’ll never earn that money back. But that’s ok!

Until now, my purpose of going to workshops was not as part of an intended CPD (continuous professional development). I took workshops because I wanted to be a better dancer than I was, for me, not for anyone else. Now it’s a bit different. I don’t just have myself to think about anymore. So now, workshops are, in addition to making me a better dancer, about having some current knowledge from the field. New techniques, what’s outdated, what’s not considered safe anymore. What’s acceptable, what isn’t. What’s fresh, what’s interesting. What can I take home for me to work on, and what will benefit my students? How do they teach – do I like it or not? Why/why not? There are now so many reasons to go to workshops beyond making me a better dancer.

In any profession, you have to attend CPD. How would you like it if you went in for surgery and your doctor was using out of date approaches that were no longer considered safe? How would you like it if your gas fitter botched your repair works because he hadn’t done the recent training? How would you like it if your house fell down because your builder hadn’t bothered to learn how to build a house properly? How would you like it if your dance teacher seriously injured you because she didn’t know what she was doing? It’s all relative isn’t it? If you’re a dance teacher, you should never ever stop also being a student. There is never nothing else to learn, and money is not an excuse. If you’re taking money for teaching dance, you need to find the money to invest in your professional development. I don’t care if you’re not a ‘real’ professional. There’s more to being professional than earning your sole living from dance.

So all of this got me thinking about our responsibilities to our students and to our art form and the way we present it. While it may feel great to be so popular that you’re booked all summer, there’s more to presenting this dance than putting on a pretty costume and dancing. You could be the first bellydancer anyone ever saw. If you do a terrible job, you do a disservice to all of us that are working so hard to change perceptions about our dance, and trying so bad to get our dance respected by other dance professionals and the general public.

   

Tahia Carioca

And what about cultural appropriation? If you’re white (?), Western, insert religious belief here, and you’re teaching bellydance, you need to be respectful and educate yourself. I am a white British agnostic that teaches a Western interpretation of Middle Eastern Dance. Needless to say, I am not Middle Eastern, I am not Muslim, and I am not in any way connected to that part of the world through genetic lineage. I teach Tribal Fusion – that doesn’t mean that I ignore where my dance form came from. It does not mean that I should completely disregard the origins of the dance form I’m performing, and it does not mean that I don’t care about where it comes from and what is going on there. Surely as a fusion dancer, it is even more imperative that I represent my chosen direction with the respect and recognition that bellydance deserves. I was taught dance by (mostly white, not always) Western women and I have a very Western mindset towards learning and teaching dance. I recognise that, just as I recognise that when I collected qualitative data in my day job, my analyses were never totally free of bias… I still feel it’s my responsibility to teach my students to be respectful of where bellydance came from, regardless of my country of birth. I might not dance to Middle Eastern music, but I understand it. I trained in oriental before I became a fusion dancer. I never say that I do ‘insert dance here’-fusion (e.g. Flamenco Fusion, Indian Fusion). I don’t know enough about those dance styles to do that. That’s cultural appropriation right there. I do not want to teach my students a ‘mish-mash’ of styles, and I certainly do not want to present that to an uneducated audience as bellydance (and on the subject of ‘mish-mash’ or fusion… are you an expert in those styles too? If you don’t take workshops, how can you be?). Ignorance is not bliss, it’s just rude. Now I’m not saying that fusion or evolution of a dance is a bad thing – authenticity in bellydance is a difficult one to pin down (just like Tahiya Carioca took on her stage name due to her love of Brazilian dance and incorporation of Latin footwork to her vocabulary, and the Reda troupe incorporated balletic movements into the bellydance vocabulary, thus changing modern Egyptian bellydance forever). But being respectful of the origins costs you nothing.

I want my students to have fun and enjoy dance and coming to class. I want to provide an environment where they get fit, they socialise, they feel comfortable, and they get educated. And to do that I need to be educated too.

Opportunities for training even exist
in our own homes these days

Workshops are an investment. Taking yourself away from that arena and continuing to teach is, in my humble opinion, irresponsible. There is always so much to learn. I hope to be an eternal student. I hope I never get so complacent that I feel I don’t need to do it anymore. I hope that money never gets so tight that I stop learning. If that happens then hell, I’ll go out and get a 9-5 job so I can pay for it. Dance is my passion and for those that look up to me in a classroom as an expert, I need to make myself as much of an expert as I can be. All that is done through constant learning, study and dedication. And with online classes these days, at really affordable prices, there is no need to be uneducated and out of date.

Being a teacher is about so much more than just showing up each week and teaching a routine. I learned that from my first teacher, Karen – whenever we were learning a new sub-genre of bellydance in her classes, she gave us handouts with information on the style and where we could learn more. I feel she put me in good stead to go out into the world and be a good teacher the way she was to me, and each regular teacher I’ve had since has been to me.

Knowledge is the most important thing in the world. As educators, we need to consider our roles and responsibilities to ourselves, our students and to the wider community.

Donna Mejia

For more on cultural appropriation in bellydance, I highly recommend studying with Donna Mejia – the first person to hold a full-time appointment as a tribal fusion bellydancer at the collegiate level. She teaches a fascinating lecture on the subject that really gets you thinking about our responsibilities as fusion dancers.   







Links:

Online training: www.daturaonline.com   |   www.powhow.com

Free educational resources: www.gildedserpent.com   |   www.suhailainternational.com/resources