Teaching Statement:
As an educator, I believe knowledge is a human right and a necessity for our reclamation of empathy and sustainability as a species. I believe that inclusive, decolonized education is our greatest hope for social change and that art is the greatest platform for radical personal and collective transformation. I teach because it is the most direct and personal way to engage in our future. I teach dance classes to help students experience and embody knowledge, and to encourage practices of consent, personal agency, and self-determination. Through the body students are able to cultivate a relationship with their inner psychosomatic landscape and develop a nuanced understanding of their individual thresholds. I see dance training as essential to unifying our emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual selves. As a lecturer of Dance History and Performance I believe the study of dance is an incredible mirror into our socio-political histories, our cultural complexities, and our global ancestral wisdom.
I design classes that incorporate play, somatic intelligence, relational skills, sensitivity, and creative investigation of individual holistic capacity. My Contemporary classes blend my versatile background in Urban Contemporary (a blend of house dance, breaking, and modern), Ido Portal’s Movement Culture, Release technique, European floorwork, Transnational Fusion, and Gyrotonics Expansion system to create fluid power, dynamic physical intelligence, and integrated respond-ability. As a fusion dancer and artist I find joy and inspiration in exploring many intelligent modes and approaches world wide and believe that dancers today must be versed in and prepared for a vast array of demands, qualities, and aesthetics.
I am certified teach to Gyrotonics, Transnational Fusion, and Floor Flow and have been teaching Contemporary dance technique at the college level for three years. My technique classes begin with a game to engage with community, move into the floor for an investigation of weight, kinesphere, and spinal articulation, move into a yoga inspired warm up to activate the core, focus on alignment and sequential-ness, and then move to standing for more traditional explorations of technical progression. We then move across the floor in locomotion patterns building from the ground up until we can work on traveling through space, shifting the weight of the pelvis, and adding rhythmic or jumping components. We culminate with phrase work, improvisation, or workshop topics to dig deeper into the various skill sets required of dancers.
My lecture courses examine dance as a visual art medium that reflects cultural values and phenomena. I teach Dance in Pop Culture and Media Studies, Dance in Cultural Perception, and Dance History from a Post-Colonial lens. I believe in treating the dance traditions of every region with respect and curiosity, and teaching history from a chronological approach instead of a hierarchical one as part of reconciling the atrocities of the past. I believe by deconstructing the media and popular culture we teach students to think critically about the modes of cultural production that surround them in their own contexts.
My classes offer both a deep investment in biomechanics, creative exploration, and contextualization of practice in the broader context of dance history and philosophy. As a recipient of an MFA degree in dance I am committed to representing dance with cultural sensitivity, a post-colonial lens, and sincere curiosity. I am inspired by the interdisciplinary approach taken by contemporary performance studies scholars and believe that dance is both a repository and creator of meaning.
I design classes that incorporate play, somatic intelligence, relational skills, sensitivity, and creative investigation of individual holistic capacity. My Contemporary classes blend my versatile background in Urban Contemporary (a blend of house dance, breaking, and modern), Ido Portal’s Movement Culture, Release technique, European floorwork, Transnational Fusion, and Gyrotonics Expansion system to create fluid power, dynamic physical intelligence, and integrated respond-ability. As a fusion dancer and artist I find joy and inspiration in exploring many intelligent modes and approaches world wide and believe that dancers today must be versed in and prepared for a vast array of demands, qualities, and aesthetics.
I am certified teach to Gyrotonics, Transnational Fusion, and Floor Flow and have been teaching Contemporary dance technique at the college level for three years. My technique classes begin with a game to engage with community, move into the floor for an investigation of weight, kinesphere, and spinal articulation, move into a yoga inspired warm up to activate the core, focus on alignment and sequential-ness, and then move to standing for more traditional explorations of technical progression. We then move across the floor in locomotion patterns building from the ground up until we can work on traveling through space, shifting the weight of the pelvis, and adding rhythmic or jumping components. We culminate with phrase work, improvisation, or workshop topics to dig deeper into the various skill sets required of dancers.
My lecture courses examine dance as a visual art medium that reflects cultural values and phenomena. I teach Dance in Pop Culture and Media Studies, Dance in Cultural Perception, and Dance History from a Post-Colonial lens. I believe in treating the dance traditions of every region with respect and curiosity, and teaching history from a chronological approach instead of a hierarchical one as part of reconciling the atrocities of the past. I believe by deconstructing the media and popular culture we teach students to think critically about the modes of cultural production that surround them in their own contexts.
My classes offer both a deep investment in biomechanics, creative exploration, and contextualization of practice in the broader context of dance history and philosophy. As a recipient of an MFA degree in dance I am committed to representing dance with cultural sensitivity, a post-colonial lens, and sincere curiosity. I am inspired by the interdisciplinary approach taken by contemporary performance studies scholars and believe that dance is both a repository and creator of meaning.
