Okay. It's been a minute since I've been able to clear time to write a post here. I blame myself for having interesting ideas and then realizing that making them happen takes up time I don't always have available. In my last post, I mentioned the idea of filming myself teaching class exercises for my Adult Beginner Ballet students, so they could review what we had done in class during the week. I have to admit that attending one class a week on a new endeavor can seem like too little time to learn and retain information! And I appreciate that there is interest in adding a second class each week, but that is for another discussion. 
cropped screenshot of video set to film me demonstrating barre.
I do like the idea of begining adult dancers being able to review and practice what we do in class. This is not unlike professional dancers today being able to review video footage of their rehearsals each day, especially when they are learning or developing new choreography.
However, my own sense of efficiency meant planning out the least intrusive method of filming class, and respecting that my students would not necessarily want to see themselves taking class. After class, I edited the footage into 8 short clips, to provide the clearest explanations and include the music played by our accompanist, should dancers wish to practice on their own. Yet even as I was editing this first attempt at recording class, I kept thinking of better ways to edit certain things (zooming in and cropping the frame, including some of the explanations beyond just giving the exercises, whether or not to have a video/still image available while the music plays, etc.) So in the interest of timeliness, I allowed myself to try and improve the next exercise, and left the earlier ones as I had done.
There is so much good (and more carefully planned) instructional video available online, that I would not dare to presume a general viewership for this little endeavor. But I will check with the dancers in class, if they took a look, AND if they have suggestions, OR if this was helpful in any way. For the time being, I am only sharing access to watch the videos if you have taken the class. As I mentioned before, the progression of each class is often dictated by the dancers in the class, and I don't want to be building a prescribed syllabus that may not work for the particular types of learners, and experience of the dancers in class.
However, since I cannot provide more than one class a week for the Adult Beginner Ballet dancers (a few are able to take classes with other teachers, but others only take mine), I would like for them to have the chance to reinforce their learning. Even just mentally reviewing material on a daily basis has been proven to improve assimilation of new movement skills.
Recently, I have been playing with a language app on my phone to see how much German I remember, and it sends me an email reminder each day to do a short lesson. Mostly I can do a short lesson in about 5 minutes, so it is obviously not a serious commitment on my part. But German is a language that I used to spend about an hour a day following a language program, when I had no knowledge at all.
I appreciate all that technology and communications infrastructures affords most of us these days, in terms of access to learning different skills. However, as a teacher from an earlier generation, I am trying to embrace how I might incorporate and add to the positive experience of the dancers who come to my classes. I am a self-taught cameraman/video-editor/online-content-generator, and I make lots of blunders! This self-taught thing though, means that I spend a lot of time just trying to figure out how to do things, as well as evaluating if what I am doing is effectively in line with my goals.
The Taylor Center for Dance Education has built a large and varied program of movement learning, from 3-D assisted body-mechanics analyses to yoga to ballet to modern to many other approaches. If you have not already danced in our new spaces at,
307 W 38th Street, 9th floor, in NYC, I hope you will come by and see what we are offering.
Until soon...
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