Descriptive+Review+Notes

=Descriptive Review Notes ................................................................................ = NDEO conference October 20, 2010

// Teaching Artist: Christopher Yaeger // //Facilitated by Diane Aldis & Jessi Kolodjiez // //Notes taken by: Diane // //Number of participants: approx 32-34 //

Describe what you noticed:

 * Solving problems – Teacher & artist talking through how to get music to play on our side
 * Orientation in space: unison, dancers facing the screen, stillness contrasted with dancers facing each other in open horseshow shape, the liveliness of that formaton
 * Instructor is in a studio by himself; there are no students with him.
 * We’re playing the music here, and he’s listening to it from our speakers, but his timing is slightly slower than ours. He does the movement a movement after we do it/after the downbeat we hear.
 * Call-and-response as teaching strategy & in the dance
 * Minimal start & stop; Jessi and Christopher kept the pace moving
 * Christopher was integrated into the circle with us when we were in the horseshoe shape. It seemed like he was in the formation with us.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Mirroring – students have to get used to doing the opposite side. Christopher sometimes said “Your right” but he used his left to show us.

<span style="background-color: #fdcefd; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What questions came up for you?

 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Where is Harlem?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Who were the musicians who played this music?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">How much did you have to practice the technical aspects?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">When you complimented us “You were fabulous!” was the compliment sincere? Could you really see us in the little box in the corner?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Should I let my students be themselves with the music or should I create and teach some choreography?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Do you ever have students with you when you teach? Can this be used with a live class? For example, can you teach students in the studio with you at the same time as you connect with another class of students?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What about the racial tension at that time? What happened - or changed? How does that factor into later dances and today ?

<span style="background-color: #fdcefd; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Speclate: What did the presenters want you to understand?
//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> ("Presenters" can includes the session presenters as well as the teaching artist.) //
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">He wanted us to understand some of the different styles of the dances.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">That the movement is African-based.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">There are set steps, but they can be combined in an improvisation way, can even add new steps.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">They wanted to show us the possibilities that technology offers us.

//<span style="background-color: #fdcefd; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Presenter Responses: //
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Christopher: <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Racism was a big issue in Harlem Renaissance - and it certainly wasn't resolved. Clubs were segregated, black and white did not mix on dance floor. It marked the //beginnings// of African American consciousness in a public arena, but racism factored into all those experiences. That struggle is still going on **today**. During that time, white people began to see dances, music, artistic work and writing from within African American community - it began to crossover to other communities and become visible in popular culture. I would love to work with kids in the same space as me and work with a far stie at the same time. Yes, I could see you. //<span style="color: #6f076f; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Other participants added: What he sees is all of us on the big screen with Christopher in the little square in the corner. It’s the opposite proportions of what we see on our screen. // <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I honestly thought you were fabulous! You are very skilled and imaginative dancers – and of course, you wanted to be here. That’s not always true in school dance classes. Good questions about the musicians, we would go further into that in a full unit. Some of the musicians you’d learn about would be Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Harry xxxx.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Diane: <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Yes, I’ve done multi-point conferences through The Performance Lab. In that project, Perpich Center students worked with a school in New Jersey and Julliard to do mutliple three-way video conferences over several weeks. Risa Steinberg was at Julliard teaching an excerpt from Limon repertory to her students as she also taught it to Perpich Center students and to a class that Dale Scmid works with in New Jersey. I’ll put some info about that in our wiki.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jessi: We did a lot of tech set-up for this! About an hour-and-a-half. It’s usually not that hard with a school, but I always do a test connection first with the teacher or media specialist before we ever connect with a class.

<span style="background-color: #fdcefd; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Open Discussion:
//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What are some things you wish you could do? // <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Christopher: I wish I knew your names! I’d much rather call you by name rather than “you in the blue.” That’s where I depend on the classroom teacher to help organize the group and call on people by name. I wish we had better lighting… also often want to know more about the students: have they done any dancing before? What do they already know about the Harlem Renaissance?

//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">How do you manage the classroom? Especially a typical class in the schools with 30 – 35 kids? That creates real challenges in terms of space, student behaviour, everybody being visible. // <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Christopher: Again, that’s where the classroom teacher is crucial. He or she has to mange the students, re-direct them or pull someone aside if they’re being disruptive. The technology itself can help; students like seeing themselves, they get immediate visual feedback, so that often helps focus a class; on the other hand, they can get distracted & competitive to be in the spotlight.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Diane; You use a lot of the same strategies you would in a large classroom: rotate lines so different students are in front; organizing the space; showing in small groups. Someone noted that we moved from forward-facing lines to an open horseshoe shape.

//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Where is Harlem? // <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">You mean black Harlem? Yes, <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">There’s also Spanish Harlem. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Black Harlem is considered to start at 116 street above Central Park and goes to 142 St. More recently, a lot of African immigrants have settled in the area: Somali,, xxx. [Diane: I'm mot sure I got the streets right and I didn’t catch all the info. Please email me so I can update notes].

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This would be a wonderful tool to work with young people with catastrophic illnesses, people who might be in isolation in hospitals. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">..... Or you can use it with students far away who don’t have dance teachers in their community.

//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Do you ever go to the classrooms to work face-to-face with students? // <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jessi: Yes, Cowles Center does this about half the time. We can either use video conferencing or send the artist to work with students at their schools. We work with schools all across Minnesota, but we also work across the United States.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Diane: Perpich Center blends face-to-face work with distance learning tools such as video conferencing and the wiki you see here [points to projected image from her laptop]. For example, we work with a school in southern Minnesota that offers a semester-long Global Cultures through the Arts course. Some of our dance artists go to the school as a residency and also they teach the students using video conferencing; others like Christopher have worked with those students purely via interactive video conferencing.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">T//his has been really inspiring – it's given me some ideas. We have this equipment, but the performing arts faculty have never used it.// <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jessi, Christopher & Diane: Thank you! Let us know about projects you're working on - let's stay in touch.