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PVP Addresses |
A response to Sue Street’s Dame Peggy Van Praagh Memorial Address14 July 2008 | By Shirley McKechnie OAM In this, the eighth address honouring the contribution of Dame Peggy van Praagh to dance in Australia, Professor Sue Street reminds us of many things we take for granted: of perceptions that are skewed by previous certainties no longer true and of ideas that are out of date and in need of some rethinking. Most important to my mind is her emphasis on creativity and the new knowledge now available to us through the work of eminent scientists like Susan Greenfield and Robert Knight. Greenfield is only the most recent of several highly respected neuroscientists to point to the extraordinary plasticity of the human brain in the early years of childhood and the implications that this knowledge has for the future education of our children. These are matters on which I would like to make special comment. Any discussion of this in relation to dance and dance education in Australia must acknowledge the work of pioneers and enlightened teachers like Laurel Martyn in Melbourne and Joanne Priest in Adelaide who, like many others, worked without scientific evidence, but in the sure knowledge that children and teenagers needed much more than training to develop their full potential as human beings, and in many cases, as the dance artists of the future. In her address Sue acknowledges the important influence of Laurel Martyn in her own early training. (Forgive me if I refer to Sue Street by her first name. It’s hard to be strictly academic when one has shared so many dance experiences and ideas over many years). Sue is also right in pointing to Peggy van Praagh’s passionate commitment to both dance education in the broadest sense as well as to the development of choreographers. Peggy’s dedication to the advancement of The Australian Ballet is unquestioned, but it went hand-in-hand with these other interests that were part of her life, her thinking, and indeed, part of who she was. As an early advocate for dancers’ rights she earned some raised eyebrows in London. Fond of making jokes against herself, she once remarked that Dame Ninette de Valois sent her out to the colonies because she was so much trouble at home. Back to serious matters: I am so glad that Sue has posed questions about the viability of contemporary dance and perceptions that have grown since the significant restructuring that took place in the early nineties. Those were difficult times and much has changed. Granted, we have fewer small repertory companies like Tasdance and Dance North—at least as they were in the relative affluence of the early nineteen eighties. I would like to add a few thoughts to this discussion. In the late nineteen seventies I became very conscious of what was famously called the ‘dance explosion’ in America, mostly, of course, in New York. I thought at the time that this extraordinary interest in dance must be due to the growth of dance courses across the USA. I believe that we are now experiencing similar phenomena in Australia. With the growth of dance courses in the tertiary institutions, we now have significant numbers of University graduates with a real experience of dance. Not all of them are elite performers, but they have graduated with a realistic knowledge of the demands of professional performance, and all of them have been exposed to an informed and critical approach to dance. We now have considerable numbers of highly trained dancers with a capacity to be dance leaders, dance makers and dance thinkers. Some of them go on to postgraduate studies in the art form. Others explore different domains, like psychology and anthropology, education and the physical therapies. Some join with colleagues in the other arts to explore ideas that are expressed in new forms that have emerged, as the digital age offers ever more ways to imagine, and more media in which to create. As Sue has pointed out, we now have more dancers and groups, more choreographers and greater audience interest and participation than ever before. These are matters for which we should be profoundly grateful, and so we are. It seems to me that the postgraduate studies now on offer have taken over the role formerly executed by the small and medium sized companies. This has coincided, indeed, been exacerbated, by the universities’ emphasis on research and the ever-pressing need to upgrade qualifications as the discipline defines its role within a university research environment. There are many benefits in this for dance students. The main one, I believe lies in the opportunities it offers to extend one’s career in the field. As physical capacities fade there are fewer careers in performance and many leave dance forever when they see no other direction. Is there a price to be paid for this surge of interest and activity within the university? I think there is. In the early eighties we had eleven small companies in Australia and I believe that most of them were able to pay their dancers for 52 weeks in every year. We now have one such ‘small’ company—The Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide. The opportunities for dance students to become professional dancers in a contemporary dance company have greatly diminished. This is a sobering fact. I offer no solutions but I am a great believer in evolutionary principles. Our dance community is different than it was twelve or fifteen years ago and it will continue to change as the world around us changes. Adaptation is our only path to solutions. For humans the royal road to adaptation is creativity. Sue has told us that ‘those who illuminate significance and bring meaning to the world will flourish as we move from the information age to the conceptual age’. If this is true, and I’m sure it is, we must ask, yet again, why we still accept an education system that has been described as ‘narrow, partial, entirely inappropriate for the 21st century and deeply destructive of human potential’. I am wholeheartedly with Sue when she asks ‘how infused with creative challenges are dance classes and teaching approaches?’ I would dearly love to see creative challenges in every dance class taught to every child. An exclusive concentration on physical skills can produce great little dancing machines but we must ask how often it encourages the truly imaginative child to use these skills in the pursuit of imaginative play and creative outcomes. Ken Robinson is, I think, well known to many of you as a great advocate for what has been termed ‘cultural and creative education’. Like Howard Gardner and others, he continues to argue for recognition of the fact that there is a huge variety of ways of knowing. ‘The disciplines’, he says, ‘ are constantly merging, reforming, cross-fertilising each other and producing new offspring.’ In dance our primary mode of knowing is kinaesthetic; we know that our bodies know when we can execute that difficult transition, that new combination of demanding dynamics and phrasing with ease and joy. But this is not all we know. We know that we feel satisfaction and joy. We think about it, describe it to others, go back into the studio and show how we arrived at a particular clarity of action, or why we are excited when we see a fellow dancer produce something that seems entirely new and original. To have thoughts about what our senses reveal we summon our unique ability to speak to ourselves and others in a code derived from our evolutionary history: that of speech. Charles Darwin recognised that to understand humans it is first necessary to understand how they gather and transmit knowledge in ways similar to and different from their animal forebears. Embodied knowledge, reflection on it and communication about it, is the special domain of the human species. It is at its most potent in dance. I am saying here that the dance class can be a time when imagination, reflection and understanding all occur together. To concentrate only on physical achievement is to severely limit the power of dance to develop creative individuals. The best dance teachers, I suggest, are those who value adventurous imaginations and who know how to help their students to channel mental images and thoughts into physical movements structured in time and space. The earlier this process starts, the better. It can become a marvellous habit. Esther Thelen, a developmental psychologist working with young children, offers further insight into these complexities. She has written:
So we must ask of dance educators, as well as those whose major focus is the training of physical skills, that they consider these matters. ‘Creative processes’, says Ken Robinson in his book Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative, ‘are rooted in imaginative thought, in envisioning new possibilities’. But creativity goes further. Whatever the task, creativity is not just an internal mental process: It involves action. ‘A first definition of creativity’ says Robinson, is ‘imaginative processes with outcomes in the public world.’ I think that this has something to do with Sue’s proposals about reframing our arguments about the value of the arts. But perhaps a final comment on the nature of creativity. Most thinkers in the field now agree that creativity must always be valued within a particular context. For a five year old this may be something that is new and original for the child, something he or she has thought of and done for the first time. The psychologists call this personal originality. When the creative outcome is new and original for humanity as a whole it can be thought of as historical originality. We in dance know that there is another kind. Some of our thinkers call it social originality and we often see it in a performing arts ensemble: a small community of dance artists or musicians. A group of scientists or children at play can exhibit the same kind of creative collaboration. The exchange of ideas in any medium between small groups of humans can be seen as both dynamic and evolutionary. The crucial element in such a system is time. As we all know, and as Sue has pointed out, there is seldom enough of it. When there is, we can see how creative collaboration can produce the most surprising results, often to the astonishment of those who have produced it. What is at the heart of richly evolved dance making can also be seen as a constant in human affairs; perhaps an innate adaptive mechanism for the survival of the species. Ritual, ceremony and magic were early human responses to the mysteries of existence. All were embodied ideas or knowledges enacted to influence potent powers and forces beyond human understanding or control. They also served as a means of passing life-sustaining values and beliefs to future generations. It seems to me that the most successful choreographers are those who emulate our ancestors in their regard for human values. Can our dance teachers be trained to emulate the example of our most skilled choreographers and their creative ensembles? I think they can. When I get myself into a knot over these sorts of questions I like to think of that statement at the beginning of Judith Lynne Hanna’s book, To Dance is Human, published nearly thirty years ago. She wrote:
This all sounds important to me. And the neuroscientists are right. We can persuade our teachers, especially our dance teachers, that children are up to it. |
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Copyright 2007 Australian Dance Council—Ausdance Inc. Acknowledgements |