There is much to celebrate after all your focus and hard work. Here you are, poised to begin the journey. Who knows where it will take you?
I also trained as a dance teacher, but life took me on a path I never expected, involving more creativity than I envisaged but also many opportunities to teach and guide. Without the skills acquired in my teacher training I would never have been able to tackle the range of experiences that came my way.
‘Dance,’ said the philosopher RG Collingwood, ‘is the mother of all languages.’ This to me suggests that as teachers you impart knowledge in a world where learners understand things mainly through their bodies and dancing. Of course, spoken language matters, but the special thing about dance is that it is in the tacit, unspoken exchanges of knowledge and countless embodied experiences in which learning takes place. The learner needs room and time to experience how their dance can communicate as bodily expression.
Thinking back to my own teachers I feel privileged to have met some remarkable individual artists, teachers and pioneers – encounters which stay with me to this day. Leo Kersley, the former Vic-Wells dancer, taught ballet to me as a teenager. He always referenced the expressive potential of ballet directly back to the historic theatre dance form it is – with its great music, choreographers and performers. During my training at the Royal Ballet School, Dame Ninette de Valois was an exacting and demanding teacher (and rather terrifying!). But she truly encouraged curiosity. She arranged Q&A sessions every term, enabling us trainee teachers to ask her whatever we wanted.
‘I feel privileged to have met some remarkable teachers – encounters which stay with me to this day’
In my later contemporary dance training, Robert Cohan, who danced with Martha Graham, emphasised the economy of effort and the expressive power found in movement. He also stressed the importance of individual authenticity of expression, from the moment a movement impulse begins within your body.
Resilience acquired through training, discovery and curiosity have taken me through many a daunting situation. Working in theatre, I encountered a director who asked that the movement language for the actors should encompass ballet. So for Strindberg’s A Dream Play at the National Theatre, I taught a daily ballet class to rather unwilling actors with limited prior experience. They made startling progress, and went on to perform enchaînements in the play: even the male actors wore long tutus.
When I began work on the musical staging for Les Misérables in 1985, few plans had been made in advance. The musical score was still being finished, with no dance numbers as such, but of course there was Victor Hugo’s great story to be told through action. This situation demanded that I was open to discovery, using improvisation as well as movement shaping as I engaged with the performers to bring the characters and story to life through physicality and bodily expression.
‘Teaching dance is about engaging with people – giving them space as they develop and learn’
As teachers, your responsibility is a great but rewarding one. You are fortunate to guide learners in their moments of discovery. Learners you encounter may not intend to become dancers, but they may be excited young children, performers from other disciplines, adult learners, the differently abled or seniors discovering the joy and sensation of dance. Teaching dance is first and foremost about engaging with people – giving them the space to go on a journey as they develop and learn as dancing human beings.
I don’t doubt that you have arrived at this point in your lives because you love dance. I trust you will share that love with all those learners you encounter in your career as a teacher, guide and artistic friend. I always carry these words from the great teacher Robert Cohan: ‘Teach all you know and teach it with love.’
