"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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
Links:
Online training: www.daturaonline.com | www.powhow.com
Free educational resources: www.gildedserpent.com | www.suhailainternational.com/resources
