Teaching Philosophy

 “I always think of improvisation as being wind in my face.”- Trisha Brown 

My teaching philosophy is about awakening a sense of humanity through a deep understanding of the body’s movement. I strive to take students on a journey through contemporary methodologies that are moving away from tradition without abandoning its importance to the art form at large. A certain amount of merging history with innovation enlivens the “now” in the classroom, whether it be contemporary dance, floor work, choreography, improvisation, voice, theory of performance, or biomechanics. In other words, I strongly believe arts education is about providing a space for students to deepen their individual research while creating a dialogue with the past and present moments in history. The institution is a place where they can cultivate new ideas that arise pertaining to the future of art and challenge what has been made before them. I like to approach my work as an educator similarly to the way bell hooks describe in “Teaching to Transgress”, that engaged pedagogy is where the community of learners in a classroom share role as teachers and learners simultaneously. In my opinion teaching is facilitating the “figuring out” in the classroom. I use various modalities such as movement sequences, somatic principals, and theoretically based application to practice efficient and anatomically sound processes that will eventually enhance one’s mind and body cohabitation. I believe that integrating the study of anatomy, biomechanics, and physics into performing arts education can profoundly enhance students' artistic expression and prevent injuries.

 My approach to teaching is filled with metaphors and imagery to tap into the imagination as well as anatomical references to expand the student’s understanding of movement both theatrically and physically. I am constantly encouraging the students’ collaborations in interdisciplinary forms and strive to educate them of the similarities of all art mediums. I incorporate various methodologies such as Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints, and Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed to enable mover’s most deliberate approach to mundane action, emotion, coordination, and representation. I also use different tasks that utilize The Five Elements Theory to inform the class of the five tones and meridian connections to their voice. I find it pertinent to incite the student’s observations pertaining to the details of visual, spacial, textural, auditory, physical, architectural, and energetic elements as the most in-depth practice for understanding the sensing body. I use these approaches to implement play in the classroom via improvisation games and experiments.  If the students are fully present dance studio, theater, or site-specific location and the community of bodies that inhabit it, they can expand their movement capacity and define more clearly the dramaturgical and choreographic structures such as the social, economic, political, and environmental elements that each place and space hold inertly.