Teaching Ballet and Dance for how we Learn!

 Many years ago, due to a debilitating injury to my right leg, and a friend who had just started, I took up kayaking! I took to it like a fish to water, and it wasn't unlike my early experience learning ballet. Once I started, you would have had a hard time stopping me. For me, if I felt an ability to learn something I didn't know, it was intoxicating. The first few lessons revealed much about everything that I didn't know I NEEDED to know. Another couple of decades later, I would take my first surfing lesson, and if I had had the freedom of my youth, I might have set up camp on the beach, and lived there. 

Hawaii 2011, part 1

It can be discouragingly hard to be a beginner the older and more self-aware we become. Yet we can learn smarter and faster if we understand HOW we learn to move in different ways. As a beginner, we learn about things we didn't know needed consideration. And if we can enjoy the PROCESS, then the learning becomes an enjoyable adventure, rather than always striving to accomplish a goal: catching a wave, running a whitewater rapid upright, doing one more pirouette, landing a double tour. 

Hawaii 2011, part 2

So how do YOU learn to move like a dancer? Sports medicine and research into physical sports with a high incidence of recreational injuries provides a simple matrix for looking at how most humans learn a new physical activity: through mimicry, tactile manipulation, rational understanding, and physical experimentation. Nobody learns in just one way, but sometimes you can identify the kind of coaching that works best to help you learn: a demonstrator to mimic, a light touch to put your limbs in the right place, a clear explanation, or the freedom to let your body figure it out. 

As a dance teacher, kayak trainer, wilderness guide, or mentor, I try to offer different learners opportunities to learn as I demonstrate, explain, offer to manipulate your limbs, and encourage the bravery to trust their bodies. Observing the challenges dancers face with learning simple and highly complex moves lets me focus in on exactly the best kind of coaching that might help the dancer before me. Happily, after decades of teaching dance around the world to children, individuals from different cultures, dancers with different training than mine, enthusiasts with no training whatsoever, I no longer fear the challenges I might face as a teacher, but I embrace and look forward to exploring how each dancer learns differently.

2019 teaching in Goa, India. photo: Purnendra Meshram

In India, during my 2018 sojourn with the assistance of the Fulbright Foundation, I met many wonderful young dancers. I have mentioned a couple in a previous post, and here is one more, Pia Sutaria! You can actually hear Pia tell her story on the Royal Academy of Dance podcast from December 5, 2024!

https://podcasts.apple.com/ug/podcast/s10-e2-pia-sutaria/id1561944293?i=1000679279669

Pia has kindly recorded her endorsement of why a dancer in NYC might want to take advantage of my open classes at the new Paul Taylor Dance Company's the Taylor School studios in midtown Manhattan: Tuesday evenings for Adult Beginner Ballet and Saturday afternoons for Advanced Modern technique.

received 13 May 2025!

Alongside of teaching in India, I was also invited to join in a few celebratory weddings and got this snap with Pia in 2018!